


like a river runs

by astatueofus



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Recovery, Reunions, Vignettes, anti military sentiment xoxo, i can have a little happy ending.. as a treat, long train rides but make it feeeeelinggggss, quynh return arc hive we ride at dawn, so many geographical liberties. so many architectural liberties., traveling but make it emotions..
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29192286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astatueofus/pseuds/astatueofus
Summary: In July 2019, a marine research vessel off Norway picks up a blip on its radar. In Budapest, Nile Freeman wakes from a nightmare.
Relationships: Achilles/Andy | Andromache of Scythia (Past), Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Dizzy Ali & Nile Freeman & Jay, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 18
Kudos: 121
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	like a river runs

**Author's Note:**

> written for The Old Guard Big Bang 2021 // title taken from the bleachers song.

Nile hears her scream.

The gurgling sound of water rushing from her salt-corroded lungs and onto the boat deck, the sunlight searing her flesh. Metal clanging against metal as the rusted iron gets wedged open. There are faces – young, full of shock – surrounding it. The silent, sickening slip of the waves against the sides of the ship. The sun above, high in the pale sky.

Beneath Quynh’s hands, the metal is rough and rusted – it scrapes against her palms as she pulls herself up. For a second, all she sees is the deck of the ship, nice wooden boards and boxes on the deck, and the endless expanse of horizon and churning water. And then white blooms across her vision, her eyes fucking burning as all she can see fuzzes into a white nothing; white pain, white-hot burning over her body.

Then the shaking sets in.

She falls back into the coffin. Pain billows from the back of her skull where she lands. Her elbows knock against the metal, her legs jerking in the bottom half.

Nile feels blankness like sweeping eraser debris from paper.

Nile feels Quynh die.

She bolts upright in bed.

Nile heaves for air, heart jackhammering in her throat. She can still feel the water gushing from her throat – from Quynh’s throat – still feel it bubbling back on itself in the back of her mouth. Damp patches smear where Nile wipes her palms on the blankets.

Ice curls in her veins, someone else’s worn-smooth rage clicking inside of her.

Reality trickles back in.

The room is silent. Dark. In Budapest. Dry. Andy’s labrys is a shadow leaned against the closet. In the bed against the opposite wall, Andy is a bunched shape beneath her blanket as she sleeps.

Nile forces herself to breathe deep, taking the air in and feeling it expand in her lungs. Nausea roils in her stomach. Her hands find her cross, her eyes press shut.

She doesn’t pray. Not now. But she does focus on the way it feels between her fingers, the familiar roughness against the tips of her fingers. Where her wrist rests against her chest, her heart still races.

Through the quiet, Andy’s voice comes: “Nile?”

Shit.

Nile opens her eyes. Andy’s pushed up on her forearms, her eyes tired but trained on Nile. “You good?”

Nile makes her decision fast. “Yeah. Sorry, Andy, just a bad dream.”

“You need to talk about it?” Andy’s voice is a tired drawl. 

How? Nile thinks, how, why, where? Out loud she sighs and says, “no – uh, maybe in the morning. Sorry for waking you up. I’ll be fine. Go back to sleep.”

Andy doesn’t look convinced, but she’s Andy. Her head falls back down on her arms and she’s asleep in less than a minute. Nile stares at her. Her face is still hard when she sleeps, her dark brows pulled down  
and jaw set hard. Even in sleep, all jagged edges.

Shit. Nile looks away. She drags her hands down her face, feeling the skin tug beneath her palm, and tips her head back to the ceiling. Dread hangs heavy weights on her shoulders.

She could feel the light on her skin, feel it molten on Quynh’s wet arms. She could feel the bite of the air. She could smell the saltwater on the wind. Fuck, she can still feel it. 

A chill has settled over her skin. She had been there. She had been inside of Quynh’s skin just like that first time in April, like that second time at Copley’s, like all those countless in-between moments that jarred her awake with bile in her mouth in the middle of the night. 

Those times, when she dreamed, she felt the water rushing into Quynh’s mouth, her nose, ears, and felt it flooding her lungs, that dread darkness flickering in at the edges of her consciousness as the water claimed her. Nile felt it sure and as overwhelming as if it was her in that tomb. Again and again and again. 

And this time – Nile’s wrists tremble.

Quynh is free.

In the morning, Nile doesn’t say anything. She packs fast, not having much to pack in the first place – they were only ever gonna be here for a couple of days, it’s only been glorified reconnaissance as they've searched for a new safehouse – and waits by the door as Andy stumbles into being awake. 

She’s got that special dead-eyed look she only has before 9am as she picks up her clothes and heads into the bathroom to get changed. When she comes back out, her eyes are narrowed and tired.

“Would you pass me that thing?” Andy croaks.

The thing she gestures to is her thousand-year old ax. Nile’s moved it to the sofa so they don’t forget it. Again. (After their unfortunate incident in Italy in May, Joe’s made a point of checking if they have it before they leave the country, no matter how many extra bags they’ve got with them.)

Nile hands it over.

As Andy tucks a spare pair of socks into the case, her eyes stay on Nile. “What happened last night?”

“I told you. Nightmare.”

“How … are you doing?” Still sounds weird coming from Andy. The way she’s got her brows pushed together, Nile has a feeling she thinks so, too. 

“Better. It’s fine, Andy. Just my first death again. You know how it is.” It’s only a half-lie. Truth half full. She sees the blade flashing in the light, slicing towards and then through her, every other fucking night at this point.

The silence stretches in the air. 

Nile finally meets Andy’s gaze, and finds it narrowed directly at her, piercing as a hawk’s. “I’m fine. Can you get your ass in gear? I’m starving.”

On the first train, Andy sleeps again.

Nile stares out at the landscape. Quynh pings off the inside of her skull. They’re out of Budapest fast, the buildings growing lower. They rattle past the outskirts of a nature preserve, trees sticking out and needling the sky from within. 

Her hand drifts to her pocket, already pinching to fish out her phone. Jordan’s a sucker for trees, she thinks on autopilot; Nile will be remiss not to send her a photo.

And then she stops.

Swallows, hard.

Nile places her hands back in her lap and carries on watching the landscape speed by.

They take a bus, and then another train.

Nile is growing used to buses and trains. 

Andy picks at the peeling leather on her boots, frowning down at the scrap of coming loose like it’s done something to her personally. Watching the tense of her fingers, Nile sees Quynh’s hands clutching the sides of the tomb as she drags herself up. She looks away.

It’s dark by the time they reach Berlin. 

Amendment: it’s not a human hour by the time they reach Berlin. 

Kollwitzplatz is quiet. They slip into the stairwell and hop up the steps. The sound rings off the walls as they walk. Once they’ve reached the third floor, Nile fits the key into the lock and the two of them step into the apartment.

Joe and Nicky are at the table. They smile to see the two of them, pull them into hugs. Nile’s too tired to extol the virtues of sleep for the elderly to them. She leaves the three of them to it, reaches her room, and collapses on the bed.

She falls asleep to the sound of voices in the kitchen, the quiet undertow soothing her to sleep.

The next day, Nile slips into the kitchen. Through the window, the afternoon sun paints it gold. 

“Joe?”

He’s stood at the kitchen counter, cleaning out a palette. He looks up at the sound of Nile’s voice and raises a brow at the look on her face. “What’s up?”

Andy’s out on a manhunt for new boots, Nicky in tow. The two of them had shot back and forth in Italian for a good 15 minutes after Nicky said he would tag along, to which Andy replied that she didn’t need a babysitter. Nile, still very much learning, caught enough after that to meet Joe’s eyes and grimace a couple of times. In the end, Andy had shot Nicky one of the most evil looks Nile has ever had the privilege of seeing, and the two of them had headed out. 

Nile knows if she wants to say anything, she has to do it now. 

“I had a dream in Budapest. A bad one.” Joe’s face softens in understanding, features drawing into a sympathetic frown, ready to offer a kind word or an ear. Nile shakes her head. “No. I saw Quynh. Joe – I think she’s free.” 

Joe stills. 

Slowly, he lowers the palette onto the counter. There is something forced, methodical in the way he picks up the dishcloth and dries his hands, an almost mechanical movement in his paint-splotched fingers. 

“Tell me.”

She remembers all of it. 

They’re sitting in the living room, at the table, the pale sun filtering in through the windows.

It was a short dream – she didn’t see much, but she talks and talks and talks. 36 hours on, it has solidified in her mind. 

Joe listens. His hand is a warm weight on hers, and his brown eyes are full of a sober warmth.

So she tells him; replays the sight of the horizon (no landmass, far from any coast), the glimpses she got of the ship and its personnel (a research vessel but not one Nile recognises), the bite of the air (either Atlantic or North, if she had to guess). 

It’s almost been over an hour by the time she’s done. Only when she’s done does Joe squeeze her hand and sit back in his chair. His eyes move away from her, staring a thousand miles at the plant on the windowsill. 

His hand drags over his beard. He looks back at Nile. “You haven’t told Andy?” 

Nile shakes her head, frowns. “You think I should’ve done?”

“No. Not yet, at the very least.” Cogs are working behind Joe’s eyes. Nile can see him running through what she’s just told him, trying to slot it into place and make sense of it. His gaze slides back to Nile. “And you definitely think it happened?”

There’s no judgement in his voice. He’s feeling for pointers as much as Nile is. “Yes. I could feel it. I was in it, Joe.” She looks away herself, shakes her head. “I could feel – I felt her dying again. But I felt the air in her lungs. I could – shit, she was so scared. Relieved, I think, but so fucking scared.” 

Joe’s watching her with the same look he watched her with that first night in Goussainville, that same well of care and concern – and leashed but bottomless fear. A twitch comes to the side of his mouth. "Well," he says, "shit."

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” His gaze drifts back to the windowsill. He goes somewhere behind his eyes, stilling. It passes as soon as it comes. Joe’s brows twitch. He’s more lucid, this time, when he says: “I’ll ask Copley to put out some feelers, see if he can find anything. We'll see and move from there. You mind if I tell Nicky?” 

Nile nods. “Go ahead.” She looks down at her hands and shakes her head. “Joe, if she’s out there… we should do something. We need to do something.”

“We will, Nile. If she’s out there we’ll get her back.” 

It’s ironclad, the resolution in his voice. 

Nile meets his eyes. 

They’ll get her back.

Joe claps his hands onto his thighs. “You want some coffee?” 

***

They met Andy and Quynh in 1248. 

The two women cut a path to Baghdad themselves, where Joe and Nicky – in those days, still Yusuf and Nicolo – were taking a breather. Joe wandered the markets, eyes lingering on paints and pigments, and Nicky continued honing the art of haggling, with little success but great enthusiasm. 

Most of it he only remembers the bones of: light across the mosque floor, the crack of a pomegranate in Nicky’s hands, the buzz in the air running deep through the veins stitching together the city, a hurried atmosphere that had yet to become familiar. 

And the dreams. 

They weren’t strangers to the dreams anymore, but when they began seeing Andy and Quynh travelling, Joe and Nicky had assumed Andy and Quynh were just on a routine voyage. 

They were coming from further east than either man had ever gone, and Joe remembers how it took him days to recognise that first patch of landscape during a dream -- finally understanding that they were approaching Baghdad. When he woke up, he found Nicky staring at him with the same question in his eyes. 

Three days and two unfortunate knife-related encounters later, the four of them found themselves sitting on the floor of the house Joe and Nicky were staying in. Tea was going cold in front of them. 

Each answer brought with it more questions. As they talked, Joe couldn’t keep his eyes off of them – Quynh’s smile, Andy’s jagged shoulders and severe cheekbones. The features he had seen in dreams for almost 150 years. 

For a long time, neither Joe nor Nicky were sure if they were even real, whether or not the dreams they saw were flesh and blood. And now those dreams were sitting before them. What Joe noticed above all was that they balanced each other, perfect counterweights. How they were both quick as whips, how Andy’s suspicion, her intimidating blue stare, was tempered by Quynh’s willingness to answer their questions. 

Joe’s voice is low when he speaks. He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Beard oil shines on his fingertips. 

“Nile thinks Quynh’s free.” 

At the sink, Nicky stills. He glances at Joe, then spits out the last of his toothpaste. Joe can see him bracing as he watches the tap water rushing from the faucet and around the basin, that slight squaring of his shoulders, that too-even set to his face. It’s familiar to Joe now, has been for the last 900 years. 

The faucet shuts off. 

And then Nicky turns to face Joe, leaning back against the sink. His face is even. His eyes are trained on Joe. 

So Joe talks. 

“She saw it in a dream. A boat pulling the coffin up, a team of people – Nile didn’t get a chance to see, but she doesn't think they were military – opening the coffin. No landmasses from what she saw. It was cold. 

Maybe the Atlantic or the North Sea. Some kind of research vessel, but not one that Nile could recognise.” He recites, eyes shifting between Nicky and the patch of wall northeast of his right ear. A hard lump is slowly working its way into his throat. “She says that she died. Quynh. Nile thinks she had some kind of seizure, and her death woke her up.” He looks back at Nicky. When he speaks again, it’s in soft French: “Nico, what do we do?” 

It was Nile who saw it. 

Nile, who still rushes to the bathroom to throw up in the middle of the night, dreams haunted by the memory of getting her throat slit and falling 15 storeys in the middle of London. Her hand was too still beneath Joe’s as she talked. He had wanted – shit, still wants – to wipe the fear in her eyes away, to do anything to abate the lost look in her eyes. 

As soon as she began talking, she’d sagged down and inwards. The weight to her voice. The way she had looked at Joe when she asked what they were supposed to do. It’s a helplessness Joe recognised immediately. 

(It’s wormed its way back in. He can feel it at the back of his brain.)

It didn’t matter what he wanted. He had been useless. Staring out the window at the view of modern-day Berlin, he could only see Andy lying at the Skegness waterline. That same fear reared its head within him; the fear and rage he had tried to let go of in a Dublin tavern in 1725. 

In the present, Nicky has moved. He stands between Joe's legs. His hands are warm and solid where they cradle Joe's head to his chest. His muscles are wound springs. 

"I froze, Nico," Joe murmurs, cheek against Nicky’s solar plexus, "she needed me and I was useless."

His lover draws back, brings a hand to his jaw. “You were there for her when she needed you. Don’t call that useless.” It's a small comfort. It soothes something raw inside of Joe. After a beat, Nicky frowns. “A research vessel?” 

“Yeah.” Joe knows what he’s thinking, because it’s been running around his head all day too, curdling his stomach. There’s absolutely nothing they can do, other than hope that Quynh’s still the warrior she was 400 years ago. 

He draws his hands to Nicky’s elbows and looks up at him. "We have to find her. Nicky, we have to. We can't let her go." There's a part he leaves out, that he doesn't say, but it hangs in the air heavy as stone. 

Not again.

Behind his seaglass eyes, Nicky has steeled himself. “We’ll find her. No matter what.” 

That night, Nicky’s pulse thumps under Joe's right thumb. He can't sleep.

Impatience buzzes under his skin. 

It's ridiculous. 

It'll take Copley a while to find anything either way. And yet. 

One beat beneath his thumb. Another. 

And yet.

It's been so long since he's dwelled on it this way. Still not long enough for it to wear smooth.

When Nile had her first dream, Joe was preoccupied with the whole "being gassed and then kidnapped and medically experimented-stroke-tortured on" thing. Between Nile waking them up and the hard surface of Kozak’s beds he hadn’t had the brain space. 

His fingers tense where they hold Nicky. 

Joe closes his eyes, forces himself to remember that neither of them are going to wake up with that fluorescent light beating down on them.

Slowly, his thoughts clear and focus again. 

After they got away, it was one fucking thing after another – the negotiation over Booker, ensuring Copley’s help, skipping town as the investigations started both in Goussainville and London. He hadn’t the chance to dwell.

And even so. 

In that armoured van, his and Nicky’s hands and feet bound, Joe had felt fear snake its way in as he thought of how they’d been taken together: how they would be able to get through and out of it together like they always had, like they'd always been allowed to. The fear had hissed to him the alternate possibilities, breathed the thought of Nicky never rising from the van floor. He thought of losing him and felt the world shift beneath him. 

Andy and Quynh had weathered it all for two millennia before Joe and Nicky ever met them. They were a well oiled machine, they were two parts of the same whole. To see them torn apart –  
Joe shifts, tucking his head down so that the bridge of his nose is flush to Nicky’s back. Breathes.

They lost Quynh in 1645. Andy called the search in 1725, sitting across from them in Dublin. By the time he was looking at her from across that tavern table, he knew that something within her had shifted and would never shift back. 

Those first few weeks, she had been a spectre. She had been cut loose. When the ship returned to the harbour, she surfaced with vengeance dripping from her teeth. Even now, Joe hears the sounds of the captain's screams ringing off the walls.

Even now, he remembers the smell of salt in the air as he and Nicky tore through the guards.

_They cut through the harbour, slay the guards outside the heavyset doors. Inside, Andy is a shadow leaned against the wall, the guard's blood dark in her hair. Her eyes are vacant pools. Joe scans the cell, frowns at the spot empty beside her. They must be holding Quynh in another cell, a formality of the English superstition and fear that had wrapped the noose around her and Andy's necks in the first place._

_Nicky drops to his knees. He sheathes his bloodied dagger and begins to pick the chains around Andy's ankles._

_Joe takes her face in his hands. "Andy. It's us. Yusuf. Nicolo." He gives her their old names. Gently, he turns her to face him. Pink and red snake through her sclera. Her eyelids are swollen. Her eyes are glazed over. They settle on Joe's jaw. No recognition registers on her features. Fear digs a pit inside of Joe. "Andromache."_

_Still nothing._

_On the back of Joe's neck, the hairs prickle up. There had been a lot of guards outside the cell. More milling around nearby. For a harbour of this size with two jail cells occupied, it's a lot of manpower to lend to just one of them._

_It slowly begins to click. The details begin to drag together._

_The space beside Andy is so very empty._

_The chains clink. Her eyes drift back to the door. Nicky takes Andy's wrists and begins to work on them. The metal is ruddied with her blood. The smell of it hangs in the air._

_Her cuffs give way. The skin beneath is alabaster and streaked with blood – in some places the blood has clumped on her skin, but it is intact._

_Joe meets Nicky’s glance. They look back at Andy, and speak at the same time: "Where's Quynh?"_

His memories of those early weeks blur together: candlelight in Andy's tangled and dirty hair, meeting Nicky’s eyes and seeing his own despair reflected back at him, the refusals to eat or sleep or move, the way 

Andy threw herself on the sand and let the waves wash over her.

She spent weeks like that, despondent, barely there. The former goddess Joe had met in the 13th century had splintered apart before their eyes, and neither of them had any power to do anything about it. 

Once the ship’s crew returned, it didn't take long; they realised fast they would get nowhere with them. 

The crew had been sailing without a chartered route, only looking for a patch of sea Quynh could not rise from. A brutal storm wrecked their ship – the vessel that had damned the immortal to eternal suffering for nothing more than stoked hatred – and delayed their return. 

Much of the crew that survived the wreck had scattered as soon as the passing ship that picked them up had made landfall, and those that stayed knew little even under a blade. 

Joe remembers cornering the sailors in Nottingham, in Leeds, in Stratford, as they came out of tailors and pubs late at night. 

Some showed remorse when they were questioned. Others spat in their faces and came to regret it. However they responded, they were little help. Andy made slow work of them, even so. 

It was these nights Joe remembered the clearest; the blood, the scarring those that survived would carry for the rest of their lives. It was hard to feel remorse for these men who had stripped Andy and Quynh and hundreds of other women of any semblance of humanity and dragged Quynh onto a boat to drown over and over again. 

Still, they yielded little use. Because by modern standards, the Stuarts were navigating blind. Naval and shipping reforms came in the years their search wound down. Too little far too late.

It did not get easier. 

Joe had hoped that once they finally stopped tracking crew and started trawling coastlines, the feeling of hopelessness would abate. 

It did not abate. 

Not once they began searching the coasts for news of unusual things washing up from the water or women stepping from the waves. 

Not each time Andy tested her lungs just a little more, straining against her own body with each new dive, chasing whatever scrap of hope sank with each shipwreck. 

Not once they finally split in 1657, Joe and Nicky heading to Ireland while Andy made for the Highlands, or when they finally crossed the channel. 

Not when they reconvened months later, neither party bearing leads. 

It never stopped being raw. 

They had lost Quynh; lost a limb, a guiding lantern – one of their own.

When she’d been ripped from them, she left a gaping hole. Joe would still strain to hear her bell-chime laugh in the air on the rare occasions they’d have reason to laugh. Nicky didn’t play chess for a long, long time. And Andy – she had lost half her soul.

Lying in bed in 21st century Europe, this what Joe thinks of: 

The smell of rain hanging thick and heavy in the forest air, 14th century Vietnamese dew brushing damp against his feet. The low buzz of satisfaction in knowing that he and Quynh had traced the invaders’ tracks right and had, in a dastardly move of scoutception, pulled off scouting their enemies’ scout lines. By the time the sun broke over the horizon, they were already cutting their path back to the camp where Nicky and Andy were waiting, a pretty good idea of their opposition’s next move. 

Around them, the forest was waking. Birdsong began to filter through the air, clear and high. Undergrowth rustled where wildlife hurried through. Bit by bit, Quynh slowed to a halt. Joe came to a standstill beside her, frowning in lieu of a question. 

“Do you hear that?” Her voice was soft, uncharacteristically so. A moment later, amusement began to glint in her brown eyes as Joe tensed and strained his ears. All he was met with was the rippling birdsong. 

“The birds?” 

Quynh nodded. “You hear their song?” When Joe nodded, Quynh continued, gaze cast up to the treetops: “It’s changed. When I was a girl they sang it differently.” Here, she straightened up a little, catching Joe’s eye and grinning, before whistling off a melody – Joe was just about able to make out the same bones as the birdsong coming from above, but the difference was like the same scene painted with different oils on different canvases. At different times of year. By different artists. With vastly different ideas of what the scene actually looked like. 

Nonetheless, it held the same outline. Nonetheless, Joe listened, transfixed. 

A little into the melody, she whistled a note and sighed, shaking her head, before whistling it again. Again, she sighed. This time, she shrugged. “Something like that, anyway,” she shrugged. “You get the idea.”

With that, she carried on walking. 

Joe, who had just watched Quynh rattle off the birdsong of her youth and shrug it off like it was nothing, remained planted to the spot for a moment too long. He hurried after her, grass whispering under his feet. 

It was the ease she had done it with that stayed with Joe more than anything else. 

The birdsong had changed, but Quynh still held close what she had heard as a young girl. 

She and Andy had thousands of years of experience with picking up and carrying on, years upon years and years to reach that point. At that point, he hadn’t even been 250. He and Nicky had known Andy and Quynh for less than a century, and they were still thrown by the way they carried their millennia-old immortality; how casually they treated it. 

The world had changed, and Quynh had let it. 

From there, Joe began to notice the tiny things that slotted together into his everyday and made precious note of them. Whether by committing to memory the shine of Nicky’s current earring or drawing the glasswork in the windows of every tavern they visited in Scotland in the early 17th century. 

Somewhere along the way, he’s felt out the middle ground; middle ground he would have never found as quickly if not for her. 

He still carries her. Of course he still carries her – she had taught him that in that forest centuries ago – all of them do.

And it doesn’t hurt any less. 

Movement pulls Joe back to the present. In front of him, Nicky is shifting. His voice is low in the darkness.

"I can hear you thinking. You need sleep." 

His voice is low, but it's not groggy. He's not been sleeping either. 

Which is why, despite himself, Joe smiles into the back of Nicky’s neck. "What, and you don't?"

That earns him a displeased but resigned noise. Nicky settles back down. "Talk."

Joe doesn't particularly want to. 

Heavy rainfall had kept them in Nottingham. They were bound for Edinburgh and, having visited their compatriots, were planning to head north as soon as they could. But the skies split open the night after they'd  
left Andy and Quynh. Flash floods made the roads almost impossible to traverse. They decided to wait it out, and so, it was in a tavern in the city that they'd heard rumours of two witches captured further down the coast who just couldn't seem to die. 

It is this that Joe turns over in his hands like a penny. The sheer luck of it, the way saving one of their oldest friends had come down to a bit of rain. 

Joe doesn't particularly want to talk, but he does. 

"That storm could've never come. We could have lost them both. Even with the rain, we still lost Quynh. Nicky, we left her.” He sighs. “Andy would want to know. What if we're doing the wrong thing?"

"She'll kill herself trying to get her back – we're not even sure if she's out there or where she is. The storm did come. We were meant to stay in Nottingham, my heart, and we did. We looked for Quynh as long as Andy could." 

This, Joe cannot disagree with. He heaves a sigh. "I know." He shuts his eyes. "I know." 

Nicky lifts Joe's knuckles to his lips, presses a kiss to them. For a moment, they just lie there. 

Joe had hoped Nicky would volunteer his own thoughts himself, but as the moments tick on, he decides to nudge him. If there’s anything the two of them are good at, it’s getting inside their own heads. "Nico,” he urges. “Your turn." 

Another moment. 

The light from the street below makes the curtains glow ever so slightly, some barely legible shade of tangerine. Quietness stretches around them. A block or so over, Joe hears drunken, vaguely joyful shouts. 

"All I can think… Christ, Joe – ” the blasphemy is soft “– what did we miss? All those coastlines. All those towns. Eighty years." Nicky’s voice is a breath. “And it still wasn’t enough.”

Joe knows Nicky – his brain is hinged on the notion that most things have a solution if you can get to it; an answer or a reason or a fix. 

Losing her was the one thing that never did. 

“You said it yourself. It was tearing Andy apart.” The two of them, too. He sighs, finds himself circling back to what it has always been: “We did what it could and it was all we had, and it still wasn’t enough. That’s all it is.” 

They’ve had this conversation a million times over a million different ways. Joe knows that in the end they did what they could, just as much as Nicky does. Even with what they are still raw over, they have found their ways of carrying it – and sadly, always just barely better than Andy had been able to.

Nicky lets out a breath. “We’ll wait for what Copley can find. We’ll find her.”

Joe noses against the nape of his lover’s neck. “We will.” 

They have to. 

They owe it to her. They both know that much.

Joe’s thoughts still come frenetic, but calmer than they were. He can feel sleep tugging at him. 

Still, he thinks of it. The thought of having her in front of him again is overwhelming. The thought of what he’ll even say upon seeing one of his oldest friends after all this time – the joy, the guilt he’ll feel. 

What she will even feel. 

Some part of him already wants to apologise. 

But forgiveness is a heavy burden to bear. Joe knows this. He will not demand it of Quynh when he sees her again. 

As he drifts to sleep at last, Nicky a warm shield in front of him, a thought swims up in Joe's mind and registers just before sleep takes him:

_When._

God, but it's good to have Nile and Andy back. They've only been gone about two weeks all told. Andy’s found a couple of candidates. It’s progress. 

They talk around why they need new safehouses. Joe’s doing well, so long as he doesn’t think about it. 

He goes looking for a binbag and opens the cabinet under the sink. 

Instead finds an old stash of alcohol; he remembers drinking with Booker on the roof sometime in the 70s, the city windows yellow around them. 

Joe shuts the cabinet under the sink. 

A few days later, the three of them sit around the table. 

If there’s anything Joe appreciates about Nicky, it’s the way he can work with what they’ve got. Andy’s never been good at not knowing, at trying to do the best you can with the information at hand. They’ve organised the information, at the very least. 

However, they have stalled.

The table is a smear of brown in Joe's vision. His limbs are heavy. His head is slowly but surely beginning to crave the pillow.

Nile, too, is beginning to nod. The past month has seen her going to bed early so she can get a good run in before anyone else is up and about around the district. She rubs her eyes and lets out a sigh. 

Unfortunately, tonight time is of the essence. Andy stalked out the door and into the night a couple of hours ago, in search of a bar – the last Joe had heard, "preferably lesbian". 

On the table, sheets of paper lie in front of them: some are covered in writing and some mind maps by Nile, others with vague sketches of a boat deck that neither Joe nor Nile are very happy with, and other sketches with slightly more precision to them that show the horizon and undulating waves beneath the boat. 

Nicky cracks a knuckle, thumb pressing on the joint, his gaze angled down at the table. The wheels are turning behind his eyes. They click up and fix on Nile. 

"You said you didn't recognise the ship?"

Nile frowns a little. "Yeah. Only that it was a research vessel."

"Then it's unlikely to be American military." They have all already come to this conclusion. Nicky doesn't look particularly cheered. They already assumed that to be the case, and even so it leaves a lot of wiggle room – with regards to "American" and "military" and "American military" – and they all know it.

"I have to say," Joe says, stretching his arms above his head, "over my 900 years, I've received better news than finding out we probably won't have to break into a U.S. blacksite anytime soon. And you definitely didn't see any badges?" 

"No. I told you, they were mostly wearing winter gear. There could've been, but I didn't get a chance to get a look." Nile sighs, then rubs her face. Her tone is a drawl when she speaks again. "We're going in circles." 

"We're further ahead than we were an hour ago." Nicky offers. When Nile looks at him with a deadpan set to her face, a crooked smile breaks onto his own face. They're golden under the kitchen light.

Warmth seeps into Joe's chest. He's glad Nile’s here. He's glad. 

A noise cuts through the quiet. The sound of the lock. The muffled scrape of Andy's dull key. 

Joe looks at Nile. Nile looks at Nicky. Nicky looks at Joe. 

In a flash, Joe sweeps their notes into his sketchpad as Nile, face the embodiment of fuck it, slips under the tablecloth. Nicky looks the picture of normality as he settles his elbows on the table and lifts the mug to his lips. 

The door clicks open. 

Andy's brows are set in a hard frown, her mouth an exasperated line. She turns around once the door's shut and stares at Joe and Nicky. Normally, they would at least be on the sofa. Joe has all the habits of someone with a back problem without an actual back problem. 

It passes a moment later, Andy's shoulders dropping as she shucks her jacket off, her face growing resigned.

Joe huffs a laugh. "What happened?" 

"Nothing. I dogsat for this girl in Wedding last year. I saw her at the bar." She's plucking her bootlaces apart with angry determination. 

"And?"

"Well, Nicky, the dog tore up this vintage rug of hers on my watch. I paid her back for it myself and no, it wasn't salvageable," Andy says, preempting, in order, Nicky’s question and then Joe's. "But she told me it was the principle." She heads into the kitchen, pours a glass of water. "They all fucking know each other here. You know how hard it is to pick someone up when she’s been hearing about you, dog-enabler fucking extraordinaire, for the past year?" 

A moment passes as Andy lifts the glass to her lips, then she speaks again: "She also wanted me to move in." 

"She wanted you to move in –" Joe doesn't keep the laugh out of his voice, "– and you led with the rug?"

She grins at him over the rim of her glass. Her eyes cast downward and at the table, where they settle on the third mug. Her brows twitch. "Where's Nile?" 

"Sleeping." Nicky says.

"Sleeping and not under the tablecloth?" 

"Don't know what you're talking about." Joe says. 

"Sure." Andy's voice drips sarcasm. "Well. I'm gonna go sleep off the urge to kill someone. Goodnight." She heads out of the kitchen. As she does, she slows in the doorway. Over her shoulder she throws: "You too, Nile." 

From beneath the tablecloth comes a quiet "Shit." 

As Nile clambers up and out, Joe smiles, but his eyes are trained on Andy's retreating back. 

The heaviness of her shoulders, even now. The way, as one of her hands comes to rest on her door handle, the other graces over her shoulder and the thick flesh where the stab wound healed, a gesture that has become absentminded. 

He watches her step into the darkness.

He watches the door click shut. 

***

There’s something different about this time. 

Life flickers back into Quynh. Water roars around her.

There’s darkness. 

Something is blocking the scrap of light from above. 

Something is reaching down for her. Dark, with enormous pincers clamping down on the iron.

It drags her up. 

Her joints strain, grow too big for her body, pressure ballooning within her beneath her skin. They wrestle against her skin. The rush of the water as she is towed upwards is blinding. Pain comes in stabs in her ears, needling them apart from the inside out. 

Her consciousness is floating up and away, leaving her body behind. She feels her body slip away. The water rushes into her nose, her mouth, as it always has. Now, it is forced in by the current water flooding past. 

And the world goes dark. 

She's back fast. 

Ocean wind howls around her. It whips through the places cut out in the iron maiden, warm against her wet skin. 

Water skips in her throat, her nose. Her breath is engulfed. Her lungs scream and scream, aflame and sore. The coffin traps her on her back. Each breath is met with water. 

This is when the coughing starts. She begins to hack, the strength of it racking her body and stabbing the muscles in her stomach. 

The world is a smear of colours, of off-white and brown and something dark to the right of her vision. Pain needles her eyes, her joints, her head. Her ears feel as if someone is sawing at them from within. 

Her vocal cords have drowned and fallen away in her throat and the words die when they come to fill her mouth. 

Something creaks above her. 

With a violent lurch, the coffin swings in the air and begins to lower again. 

It is now that fear washes over her. 

Her prison hits the deck. 

Quynh tries to hold on. She is slipping away. The earth is tenuous around her. 

Sounds come from outside. The world slips down and turns black. 

An almighty wrench greets her when she comes back, a grinding and angry sound of metal on metal and heaving breaths. The iron screams to be wedged open. Quynh’s breath still bubbles in her throat. Water dribbles down the sides of her face. The air stings her nostrils before it hits the water in her throat. Her head is bursting. 

And then the lid falls back. 

She drags herself up. 

Weak sunlight dribbles down from the clouds. The heat tears down her skin. 

The water rushes from her throat. Grey sky stretches out above and all around. 

There is no sound, just the ripple of the waves against the hull. 

The world is too bright, growing more saturated by the second as her body kicks into overdrive trying to readjust, and she cannot see properly, cannot think straight, can’t breathe beyond the ragged surface of  
her throat.

The iron greets her with a hard smack. Pain radiates from the back of her skull. Her mind is blank. She has a far off understanding that she’s knocking against the sides of the coffin, her bones hitting against the metal. 

And then it goes black. 

With a jump, Quynh wakes. 

The room is bright. White light glows above her. Her eyes burn. For a few moments, she can only adjust. 

Squinting against the light, Quynh now sees the room is bare. There is box or two in the corner, a skinny wardrobe up against the wall. The bunk she’s on is skinny and it is wet. Her hair clings to her, matted at her feet and snaking up her arms and neck. Her dress is ragged and still damp. 

In her skull, her teeth chatter. 

A pile of clothes are folded on the floor by the end of the bed. 

Quynh stares at them for a long time. 

They’re plain. She can’t place them. They’re simple, essentially just shapes. The chill is starting to get to her, seeping into her very bones. She inches forward and picks them up. 

The door cracks open. 

Quynh shoots out of bed. 

Her hair tangles around her like restraints, slithering from the bed to a pool on the floor.

She’s poised to attack by the time the door is fully open. 

A woman stands in the doorway, clad in an orange vest with a strange sheen and some puff to it. Her freckled face is uncertain, thin brows arched like a question. Her mousy waves have been scraped into a bun. 

“Where am I?” Quynh rasps, reaching for English. The first words she has spoken in almost half a millennia. A lurch comes to her stomach when she realises she does not recognise her own voice. 

“We were waiting for you to wake up. Uh, North Sea. We’re headed for Norway.” The woman says. There is a rounded drag to her words. Quynh doesn’t recognise it. 

_We._

Shit.

Quynh has no answer. 

Water trickles down the back of Quynh’s neck. Her dress is sodden and icy where it clings to her skin. Her limbs feel heavy and as if they belong to someone else. 

The woman’s eyes flit her up and down. 

A tightness comes to her mouth for a moment. Something gets decided behind her blue eyes. 

“Come. Wash.” 

The woman has finally left her alone; alone in the small room, barely more than a wardrobe, with the thing she had called a shower. 

Quynh sheds her dress. 

She lets her hair drop. It thuds against the floor. The weight of it drags her down. In her hand, the handle of the knife is solid and gripped tight. With a furious breath, she digs the blade in and begins to saw. 

The matted parts are dense and unyielding. They resist her knife. The handle digs into her palm, a dull and uncomfortable pain. She forces through.

In the mirror, her eyes are wild. 

In one soft swoop, a length of hair slips to the ground. Dark against the pearl tile. She continues to cleave. More locks join it. 

Centuries.

Eventually, her hair ends at her shoulders. Jagged strands of hair cover her skin. 

The water is warm. It sputters from the showerhead. Quynh steps beneath the stream. 

It hits her skin. 

And the world cuts out. 

Someone is gasping for breath, the sound echoing off the walls. 

Slowly, it trickles back in. The white tile. The muted and yellow light. Her breath scrapes against her throat, coming ragged and fast. 

Her back is up against the wall. A drop of water trickles down her leg and spirals down the drain. Her head pulses. She leans her head forward, letting it drop between her knees, and shuts her eyes. Blood rushes  
in her ears. A steady pattering comes from the space in front of her. 

Time stretches. 

Eventually, she stretches a hand out. She runs it beneath the water, then runs it over her skin, where the salt has dried and crusted. Her hands work slowly, rubbing away the salt. At last. At fucking last. 

She still feels the bile in her throat at each wash of water.

At the end of it, her skin is smooth. 

It is now, with centuries of saltwater finally scrubbed from her skin, that she stares up at the thing spouting water at her. 

The water went cold a while ago, but it had started as hot as it would’ve been boiled. Something deep within Quynh disagrees with this: the immediacy of it, the lack of visible pumps or water source or anything that would lend her an understanding of it.

There are knots in her hair. Her scalp dots with pain as she detangles the strands, her fingers tugging on the hair. Her eyes wander over the showerhead. The sureness with which the woman operated the thing, the way she had frowned when Quynh was shocked at the steaming water, spoke of familiarity. 

She’s missed some things, then. 

The clothes are plain but warm. Plain but warm and _dry._

She slips into the long corridor outside the little cabinet she had washed in. The floor is made of something shiny and smooth, slate-grey and speckled with green and black. The walls around her are white. It’s not warm but it’s not cold. It’s a far cry from the last ship she was on, a further cry from the last ship she crewed. 

Heading back to the place she woke up, Quynh comes to a halt. The woman who showed her to the shower is standing by the door. There’s a dip to her brows. Her eyes are narrowed slightly, bunching the skin beneath them. 

They land on Quynh’s hair. The woman only stares for a moment too long. 

“D’you manage?”

“Yes.” Quynh keeps her voice even. “I want to speak to whoever’s in charge.”

“You’re looking at her.” 

“What year is it?”

The woman huffs a laugh, her mouth drawing into an uncertain smile. 

Quynh does not smile back.

In an instant, the woman’s face grows even before her mouth slants. “It’s 2019. Uh, July of.”

374 years. 

It is a fight to stay upright. 

Met with Quynh’s silence, the woman talks again: “Look. I’m Laura Graham. How are you alive?” 

It’s the first question she dodges.

Here is how it goes:

The first day, eyes follow her everywhere she goes.

The ship is teeming with people. Cleaners, cooks, the scholars -- studying the sea -- themselves. Quynh bares her teeth at those who stare too long and they do not repeat their mistake; this doesn't endear her to them -- she doesn't have it in her to care.

She feels their eyes on her. Fear threads their gazes, but something beyond it makes her skin crawl -- a curiosity that speaks of blades and peeling back whatever they can of her just to see what pumps beneath.

Rooms lurk in every corner of the ship. Quynh finds a room of vials and circuitry. 

Another holds shelves and a freezer tucked in the corner. She wanders up to it and, sleeve pulled over her hand, cracks the lid. Dead eyes stare up at her through the cold mist. She stares back down at them, at the fish they belong to, their corpses laid out in the tray. For one long moment, everything is silent. Then, Quynh shuts the lid again.

Her time is running out.

The people in charge of the ship seem to be Laura -- the woman who found her when she woke up -- Benjamin, with the fish in the freezer, and the ship's captain, Grethe. They ask for answers of Quynh. She withholds them.

Her time is running out.

She creeps around the ship, sits by the roaring beast of an engine in the belly of the ship, unable to sit by windows. The incessant rocking is enough on its own. She cannot stomach the view of the waves on top of it, that constant undulation beyond the glass.

It is too cold on the vessel. Everywhere she goes, she wears layers over her layers. Being out of the water once more, each sensation is blown to the extreme -- touch stings her, light burns her eyes, and she's constantly aware of the fabric on her skin.

The entire time, she is aware that her hourglass has tilted.

Her time runs out on the fifth night.

She heads to sleep. Down the strange, smooth corridor. Her legs have remembered where her mind refuses to, and compensate for the shifting floor.

Her “bedroom” is a room with a wall of cabinets and a single, cluttered but unused desk where she has dragged a pillow and a blanket. It is the only unused room she has found without a window. 

Something whirs somewhere. 

Beneath everything, the engine bellows. 

Quynh lies awake, curled on her side. She faces the door. The room is ink-black and the light coming from beneath the door cuts a thin, bright line through the dark. The table has been bolted to the ground. The bolts reflect the light, ever so slightly. 

At some point, the lights cut down a little outside. The strip of light dims from the glowing white to a low yellow. Lights out at 10, she recalls Laura saying. 

Footsteps pass. Low conversations carry down the hallway before fading again. 

The floor is hard, but Quynh barely feels it. 

She stares into the darkness, stares at the light. 

There’s a knife beneath her pillow – purloined from the kitchen, slipped into her sleeve beneath the guise of making a drink. Quynh isn’t sure what the standards of today are, but the stuff these people call tea is  
not tea. 

She rattles off the underside of her own skin. Being out of the water once more, each sensation is blown to the extreme – touch stings, light burns her eyes, and she is constantly aware of the fabric on her skin. 

Beyond that, several things weigh on her shoulders. 

Lying in the dark and quiet, Quynh knows there is a very real possibility that these people will decide they have had enough of what they’re calling courtesy and decide to lock her up all over again. They haven’t even sent word back to land, yet, too flustered to pull a piece of correspondence together. 

She knows the world that awaits her at the end of this voyage to welcome her back to land is not one she knows. 

And above all, there is the possibility that makes her vision fuzz at the edges: the chance her dreams have been lying to her all along, distorting her head and warping it with saltwater – the chance that she is the only one left. 

If she is the only one of the four left, she is the only one who knows. The only one who knows what it is to feel life sap from you and then knit back together within you. The only one who knows that her oldest friends abandoned her to rot at the bottom of the ocean. 

If she is the only one left, there is no one who can pay for the last 370 years. 

Movement smacks her back down to reality.

Footsteps come from outside. Muffled footsteps. Purposeful footsteps. 

Quynh’s hand slips beneath her pillow, curls around the handle. 

Shadows cut through the light. They are formless and dark in the slit of light. One step, then another. A gentle crick betrays the hand that has come to rest on the doorhandle outside.

She is already on her feet, pressed up against the adjacent wall. 

A moment passes, then another.

Her muscles tense. Her back is flush to the wall. 

The door clicks open. 

Two men, rope in the hands of the one furthest from her. 

One foot over the threshold.

And she leaps forward.

Quynh drags the blade across the stomach of one and flings herself onto the other. 

A wordless cry comes from the man slashed. 

The momentum sends Quynh and the other one down. 

The floor comes up to meet them, hard. 

On impact, Quynh’s teeth ring. She digs her knees into the man’s chest and wrests the rope from his hands. He scrabbles beneath her. Whip-quick, her fist connects with his jaw. 

His head snaps up and back. A silent moment of shock. In that second, Quynh tugs the rope around his wrists. A moment later, she’s bound his legs where he writhes. 

Behind her, a low keening comes from the other man. Blood slips against her feet when she stands up. 

She turns around. 

A puddle of blood seeps from his slumped body. It’s bad but it won’t be fatal.

Chest heaving, she looks up. 

Laura is standing in the corridor, eyes wide. Beside her, Benjamin is staring. 

They wanted to take her quietly, in her sleep; so that she would wake up bound and they could start doing whatever they wanted to her. This sets her blood boiling beneath her skin. Her chest heaves as she  
stares at Laura and Benjamin out in the hallway, washed in the dim light. 

The scientists’ faces are impossible to read. 

But something flickers in their eyes, and Quynh swears it is fear – fear and, in Laura’s slate-grey pupils, something else. 

Slowly, deliberately, she climbs off the man and draws herself up to her full height. 

Blood drips from her knife. 

Her voice is a blade, serrated and furious, and it cuts through the silence. “I will do worse things to you if you ever attempt to lock me up again. To all of you. I’m not one of your fish. I am not your anything. You will not treat me as such if you want to reach land alive.” 

There is silence once more. 

And Laura nods.

Then, so does Benjamin. 

The man Quynh slashed – Eric, apparently – is treated fast and confined to his bed. The other one has an angry bruise on his jaw and welts upon his wrists. The news spreads like a stain. The scholars stare at Quynh, then flit their gazes away as if they’d never looked. 

Amazing what almost killing two of their peers will do to people. 

They finally leave her to it. 

They speed toward land. A journey that should have taken well over a week will, most likely, take a couple more days. Quynh sees the map on the second day – it’s no small journey, and through bitter waters. But she has seen the beast in the belly of the ship, the 

Now that they can’t bind her, the crew debates what to do with Quynh. 

The days pass uneasily.

But no one else comes to her door.

Two days later, Quynh is standing on the deck. The wind rustles her hair. In the spots where it sneaks in through the scarf wrapped around her neck, her skin prickles from the chill. Keeping her eyes on the approaching landmass, she nestles into the orange fibres of the scarf.

Nausea twists in her gut, writhes and thrashes inside of her, as the waves crash up against the hull of the ship.

In the distance, the town is bright – yellow and tangerine pinpricks of lights dotting the landscape and the wide, tall houses. The dark water reflects the light, the colours smearing as the waves shift beneath the boat. 

Quynh keeps her eyes trained on the houses, on the land. 

Each moment speeds them all – speeds her – closer to the dock. 

The houses have changed, too. Stretching up along the waterfront, neat windows cut into the faces. From the distance, Quynh can make out little more than the uniformity, but even from where she stands, the colours are clear: the houses have been painted an array of red, of orange. It is a sight to behold. They cluster together closer up the hill.

It is unfamiliar in a way that makes her fingers tighten on the railing. The cold metal bites into the meat of her hands. 

Her throat feels tight. 

They pull in to dock an hour and a half later. 

Quynh walks down the wide ramp of a gangplank. It sways beneath her feet.

One last inch of metal, and then she’s on solid ground. 

It takes a lot to keep her knees from buckling. 

Quynh forces herself to take air in. 

Her feet stay even upon the ground. 

Around them, people call instructions and the ship creaks as it is unloaded. 

A moment later, Laura comes up at her side and leads her. “C’mon, you’re with me.” 

They walk down a wide street, then cut across a park, heading up and up. The street they come onto is narrow and cobbled, twisting off from the wide road; the roads are so different from the dirt roads Quynh knows – knew, she corrects herself – and different, too, from the wide cobbled streets of London. Her eyes roam each inch of the unfamiliar scape. 

"Mind the cars," Laura mentions as they exit onto a road, voice casual.

The cars being the metal things lining each side of the street: sleek, installed with glass windows, occasionally speeding by on the road with a dull roar. 

_Some things._

Houses stretch up either side of them. Window by window after window by window. Door after door. They’re pinned to the incline. 

One of the doors is Laura’s. She opens the door and ushers Quynh in, clicking the door shut behind them. They hop up a staircase, pass one landing then another. Finally, Laura comes to a halt in front of another door labeled No. 3 and unlocks it fast, again gesturing Quynh in. 

The place is cold. 

With a click, Laura flicks the light on. Quynh blinks to adjust. 

It’s an open space, windows leading out from the wall opposite a very cushioned yellow settee. A bookshelf sits against the wall, made of austere lines nailed to the wall. On the same wall, two doors. A wall stretches out to her left, an archway cut into it. Quynh sees a sink and a stove. 

Well. Interior design has changed. 

“You’ll have to take the sofa.” Laura says, already moving across the space to one of the doors. She opens it, and Quynh sees a low, tidy bed in the room beyond. 

A few minutes later, the settee is ready. 

Laura’s voice is weary when she says: “Goodnight. Bathroom’s the other door if you need it.” 

Darkness has blossomed outside. Quynh can’t drag herself from the window. Orange and yellow lights sit in the night like gemstones. She turns to nod, and then turns back.

Laura goes into her room and locks the door. 

Quynh climbs onto the sofa and does not sleep. 

Over the next day, Laura’s eyes fixate on Quynh. Only, they do it in snatches. All she feels is the creeping sensation of eyes on her before she looks and sees Laura at her own computer, typing away at something else. 

“What are you looking for?” Quynh asks, finally. 

“Nothing. Your hair is growing fast.” 

Her hair isn’t growing that fast. 

“Look. I’ll ask you again. How are you alive?”

“I don’t know.” The same answer she’s given her since the start. 

“Where are you from?” 

“Your wildest dreams. How are you planning to explain me?” 

“That’s what I’m trying to fucking figure out.” Is all Laura says before she goes back to typing and glancing. “The university is on my ass about this. Benjamin’s, too. You know how long it takes to plan one of these trips? The bureaucracy involved? So, whenever you feel like being useful.”

Quynh looks at her over the rim of her mug. 

It’s almost funny, their precarious balance – Laura knows what happened the last time they tried to capture Quynh, and knows that it had happened with Quynh showing some measure of restraint, and Quynh knows that it’s only through Laura’s seniority that Benjamin hasn’t tried to bypass their discussions and submit her for testing.

Judging by what she’s overheard, the only reason they’re getting so much leeway is because nobody wants to grapple with the implication that the objective, scientifically-minded expedition was ready to cut open the woman they found in the waves. 

So Quynh leaves her to it. In the meantime, she reads. 

More than anything, she reads. 

First, through the books Laura has on her shelves. The spelling throws her when she opens the first one, the tidy little letters – the consistency of both. She left a far different written English. 

As soon as she can, she takes to the library and begins catching up. 

She’s missed a lot of things.

Nearing two weeks since they docked, Laura looks at Quynh differently. The night before, she was talking low on the phone to somebody. Quynh hadn’t been able to make it out but not for lack of trying. “I’m going to the Hague over the weekend. You should come.”

It’s polite of her to frame it as a suggestion. 

Airplanes are hell. 

Europe has changed.

They have one room with two beds – there is an air about Laura that makes Quynh believe the arrangement is more for the sake of keeping an eye on Quynh rather than any willingness to be sharing a room. 

Her makeup is scattered all over the bathroom sink. Quynh has to rummage for her toothbrush, and considers tipping Laura’s foundation down the drain. 

During the day, Quynh wanders, mostly. 

The streets have changed. The people walking them, too. Quynh’s eyes drift over the suits, wrinkled and pressed by turns, the dresses loose against the summer sun. 

In the evenings when they are both at the hotel room, she and Laura eat dinner together. It’s so normal that it unnerves Quynh. Still, they talk. 

Laura, as it transpires, is from Virginia. The English colony in the Americas has bloated beyond all measure and remains tenuously stitched together by state lines. 

On the second night, Quynh asks: "Why did the military send you out here?" 

"I said I was Army. Got sick of it. Jumped ship and got in with the CIA while the going was good."

"Traded one murderous rank for another." She observes dryly. 

Laura’s smile is sarcastic, her freckled cheeks stiff where they pin up. "You do what you have to do. Anyway." She casts her gaze down at her wine. "Made it to Bergen. Dropped my CIA post and started at the university. I go between, now." 

Quynh watches her. 

She has one leg pulled up on her chair, her forearm resting on her knee, her wineglass still in hand. In her loose shirt and flannel pants, waves loose at her shoulders, she does not look like half the team who gave  
the go-ahead on trying to capture her on the ship almost four weeks ago.

And yet, they never do. 

Quynh appreciates the company, but she has been around for longer than the city they are sitting in, and she is not naive. 

“I have a friend,” Laura says late one night, pushing her room service away from herself, “who thinks he might know you.” 

“Does he, now?” Just to humor her, Quynh inquires idly. 

“He said he knows someone by the name of Andy.” 

She has to fight not to visibly stiffen. Red flashes across Quynh’s vision, forces a knife into a gut. She keeps her jaw set, her tone and face even. Her fingers twitch where they rest. “And this friend of yours? His name?”

Laura smiles, briefly. Ruefully. 

It flickers off her face as she speaks again. “I really can’t say more. He said that if I somehow have you within my reach, I should leave you the fuck alone. So, against my better judgement, that’s what I’m going to do. We both know what’ll happen if I don’t.” At this, despite themselves, the two of them share a wry smile. “So, I return to Bergen on Wednesday. You do not have to join me, if you don’t want.” 

When Laura gives her the option to stay, she takes it. 

Andy’s still out there. And whatever she’s doing, she’s told someone about them. 

Laura leaves her with more money from the university payroll than Quynh is quite sure what to do with. 

Once Laura leaves, Quynh finds the city at her disposal. 

So, she walks.

When she does, she glances over her shoulder, always expecting to see someone tailing after her, always expecting the penny to have finally dropped.

There is never anyone tailing after her. 

She visits Rotterdam, goes on to Copenhagen, then Brussels. 

She admires coats in window displays.

Sometimes, she buys them. 

If anything has changed, the variety of fashion has, and Quynh finds she likes it. Sharp lines, sleek cuts dominate the windows. She starts to build a wardrobe with collars sharp enough to cut. 

Her eyes snag on women with short brown hair.

She sleeps with the light on. 

She sees him in her dreams more and more. The French man she never got to meet, stumbling from bar to flat to bar and back again. Hair dishevelled and spilling over his face as he cuts down some back alley. Lying on the floor in the dark. Crashed on his bed in the light. 

The train tickets are cheap. 

Quynh arrives in Paris early. It is loud and busy around her as she steps off the train. 

In her dreams, she only sees flashes of each place – in other words, she’s got no fucking idea where Booker actually is. So, she walks into a hotel and books a room. She dumps her suitcase on the perfectly made bed and heads out again. 

People mill through the wide streets. 

This is the meat of it: simply existing feels different. Quynh watches the people around her. Something frenetic in the air, permeating each person and thread. It was the same in Holland. It’s a new rhythm. 

Apparently she still remembers French – even the dialect that the citizens of Paris speak. 

In the spring of 1640, she and Andy hobbled through learning the – at the time – unfamiliar strain of the language. Quynh remembers Andy bemoaning the rich and threatening to steal Quynh away to some far corner of the earth so they wouldn’t be forced to run missions where they’d have to speak new dialects, and Quynh herself dripping dissatisfaction at the academics all but forcing it on the people. She remembers Andy’s brow furrowed by candlelight, her voice low as she would read out chunks of it to Quynh. The light made her hair look auburn. Quynh had been far more interested in that than the new spelling system. 

The thought sends barbs into her stomach now. She pushes it away.

Each person moves with purpose, becoming a flood in the early evening: the whole city beelining home. 

On one rainy Thursday, Quynh rides the train just to watch. After twenty minutes squashed between some businessman’s armpit, an elderly lady who looks like she will decapitate the next person to look at her  
wrong, and a foggy window, Quynh decides – vows – never to do it again. She stumbles off the train at Cadet. The air is cool on her face when she finally gets back onto the street. 

She hurries down the street, the rain on her face sending nausea rolling through her stomach. 

She comes to a halt under a bus stop, swiping the raindrops off her shirt and jacket. 

As she watches the passersby, she feels her skin itch. It’s been days. She’s rusty at tracking.

Walking through the city, she remembers it as it was in the 17th century. Beyond that, she remembers the last time she attempted to track someone from her dreams. Anger forms a ball in her throat. She pushes the memory down and away.

Ultimately, she brute-forces it. In shoddy sketches, she lays out the buildings her dreams bring her when they come. She carries the scraps of paper with her. 

The bar he frequents looks like those that Quynh sees when she ventures east. She continues east. 

The landscape isn't familiar until it is. 

She finds one bar, the name emblazoned above the door just like she dreamt it. 

She finds another. 

Through the window, she spots a straight nose and sandy hair. Booker’s hunched over a table, looking half-dead. 

Quietly, she slips into the building opposite. The bottom floor is a bakery, but a sign on the door says there is a rooftop bar under renovation on the top floor, advertising a reopening party two weeks from now. 

A long hallway leads from the door to the stairs. She scales the floors quick. On the penultimate floor, any cameras are blocked by towers of boxes. Quickly, she picks the lock and makes it into the dusty, tarpaulined room. 

It's quick getting onto the roof from there. From her vantage point, she watches the door. 

The minutes drag by. 

Then an hour. 

Quynh sticks to her perch. 

Finally, she sees him leave. He staggers out of the door. Her eyes narrow as she takes him in. Slightly stocky, aggressively French, oozing guilt and contempt in the roll of his shoulders and curl of his neck. 

This is the man Andy fought with for 200 years. 

Quynh watches him grip the sides of a trash can to dry heave into it. 

Beggars truly cannot be choosers, is all she thinks as she hops to the next rooftop. 

The zinc clangs beneath her boots. 

He only goes two blocks. A familiar apartment rises up from the street. Quynh has only seen it in snatches. Now she sees the grated windows, the sand-coloured bricks stretching up and giving way to the same dark tiles that almost every roof in this part of the city had. 

A lurch rolls in her stomach. 

She also sees someone on a flat roof below her, eyes trained on the exact same spot as hers: the retreating figure of Booker.

Two minutes later, she has a knife against that someone’s throat. A siren wails in the distance, cutting through the sound of chatter and cars below. “I’ll kill you if you scream.” She hisses. 

Whoever she’s holding knows better than to fight. They also know better than to speak.

“Who are you?” Quynh jolts them both. To make her point, she readjusts the knife. She whispers into their ear, French low and hissing, “who do you work for and why are you watching that man?” 

Finally, yielding: “I’m just keeping an eye on him, I swear, I was hired--” 

“Hired? By who?”

“I don’t know, I just send him news and he just sends me the money.” 

Shit. Quynh feels dread bubble in her stomach. She shoves the boy away. He lands on his hands, pushing himself up fast. His hazel eyes are wide on his pale face.

“Tell me what you know.” She commands.

The boy’s eyes widen even further, incredulous. “No? Absolutely not?” 

“Everything you know about the man down there and the man who employs you,” Quynh dives forward and once again holds the blade to his throat, restraining him with a forearm to the chest, “or at best I report  
you to the police.” 

“I don’t know anything about him!” The boy protests, his hands wriggling out, his French rapidfire, “he goes to the same three bars, gets the same amount of shit-faced, and then goes home and sleeps for either 4 hours or 18! And the guy who hired me – he’s from London and has a Belgian country code but I get money from a Spanish bank account, so do the math on that one!” 

Quynh zeroes in. “Which three bars?” 

He frowns. 

And then relays their names.

And so, the boy begins reporting to Quynh, too. 

She doesn’t need him to – she is perfectly capable of watching him herself, and she does – but it lowers the risk of him blabbing to his boss or anyone else about the other woman keeping an eye on the man. 

Said man’s routine does not change. 

Quynh’s does. She begins to frequent the cafes around the block, keeping one eye on him over her coffee. 

The boy keeps her updated. The money probably also helps the lack of blabbing and the consistency of his updates. One thing that hasn’t changed is how easily someone’s tongue can be bought. 

Quynh watches Booker through the window of the bar. She brings her coffee to her lips. It is strong enough to make her blink a couple of times after the first sip. It’s not comforting – the fact that almost 400  
years on, money is still the driving factor in European society. 

The witch trials have stopped though. 

You win some, you lose some.

Through the window, a man goes up to Booker and taps him on the shoulder. There is an ugly square to his shoulders. Quynh doesn’t know what they’re saying, but the man looks more unhappy by the moment. 

Finally, something snaps and his fist finds Booker’s jaw.

Quynh leans back to watch, and understands why Andy kept him around. 

As she watches Booker, she also trawls the city. Europe is cleaner than it used to be, but the bar was on the ground – at the end of the day, Paris is only slightly cleaner than it used to be. Still, she visits Sacre-coeur. Wanders backstreets splashed with spray-paint. 

A measure of calmness descends onto her. She is almost within reach of him. From him, she will be within reach of Andy. 

Her dreams don’t tell her much – all she knows is that Booker was replaced by the youngster she thinks is called Nile. Something happened in-between, something big. It sits just beyond her grasp. She didn’t see it, any of it, in her dreams. Whatever it was sent him careening off from them. Whatever it was was big. 

She dreams of water and suffocation and frozen limbs. 

Saltwater cascades into her coffin. It drowns her once, then twice, then again and again until the feeling of drifting down and not coming up is a more familiar memory than the sunlight on her skin ever was. 

It is a thick rope around her neck.

The water presses in around her down here, makes the iron creak. 

And it’s so, so cold. 

Her eyes force open, stare up at the dark water as her vision begins to blacken. 

She has no breath to force out. 

There is water and only water.

In a quiet hotel room in Paris, Quynh rockets upright. 

The lamplight illuminates the room. 

The dream still has its claws in her, seeping sick cold through her bones. She gasps for air. Outside the window, rounded gray roofs stretch out above dark windows. The sky is the colour of a bruise. 

Though her hands clutch the blanket, she does not feel either. 

She blindly feels for a pillow. She brings it to her mouth, and screams. 

Her boots click against the pavement. It’s still 4pm. He won’t be home for another hour, if the bartender doesn’t decide to kick him out early. 

Something flits within her. 

She has no idea what she’ll do once she’s actually faced with him. It has played out in her head in different ways: sometimes, she sees herself stepping out from the shadows and demanding everything he knows – other times, she slits his throat and takes what she can get. 

Soon, it is Booker’s apartment building that stretches up by her side. She slips through the door. Inside, the stairs she has dreamt time and time again. 

Clicking her pin into the lock, working the mechanisms, she slips into the apartment. 

And finds little more than a room. Frowning, she pushes the door shut and steps in. To her right, a small table inexplicably holds a printer. A window sits above the sink, letting in light. Beside it, a fridge. In the middle of the room, a table with two sparse chairs, covered in half-eaten leftovers. Two armchairs pointing at a TV on the far wall. Only one of them has a rumpled cushion. To her left, a bed is pushed up against the wall. The walls were probably once white. Now patches of it are turning to off-white and yellow. 

Heavy in the air is grief. 

Quynh takes a further step in. Her eyes rake over the things on the display cabinet. Scraps of paper, an empty bottle. Pieces of pottery, a jug or two. Plates. Scraps of paper. An empty bottle. There’s a book lying on the floor by one of the armchairs, big and leatherbound. Don Quixote. 

A jug of water sits by the sink, glass with a wide lip. She pours herself a cup and takes in the room. 

Outside the door, a glass shatters. The sound shimmers in the air. Quynh downs her water and turns to pour more. 

When the door pushes open, she is ready for it. 

The raised gun does not surprise her. Booker’s eyes are hazy, threaded with red blood vessels behind the barrel. 

“Booker. It is good to finally meet you.” She takes a sip of water. Smiles at him, a little. He remains hunched in, staring at her.

Quiet spreads in the air between them.

“You’re Quynh.” His voice is quiet and it is ragged. A touch smeared by the alcohol. He does not lower the gun.

She nods. Letting the smile drop from her face, she puts the glass down. It clinks against the countertop. It is easy to keep her tone cold. “Where are the others?” 

At this, Booker barks a harsh laugh. He clicks the safety on and chucks it onto the table in one fell swoop, picking up the half-full bottle on the table instead. “I don’t fucking know.” 

“Do not lie to me. You’ve been with them for the last century.” Quynh narrows her eyes. “How do you not know?” 

She tracks his movements like a hawk. His hands are unsteady lifting the bottle to his mouth, swaying ever so slightly. The muscles in his throat work when he swallows. Impatience bubbles inside of Quynh. 

It takes a further moment for Booker to finally speak. 

“I betrayed them. They kicked me out. I won’t see them for another hundred years. They could be in space for all I know. That a good enough reason for you?” 

“Betrayed them? Why?” If he has no information for her, she’s back where she started. The places she sees through the young woman are few and far between and hard to identify – she has no idea where the fuck they are. She will find something. She has to.

“I’m a selfish bastard, that’s why.” Saying this, Booker lurches forward to rest his head on the table. His shoulders roll after him. “Selfish and alone, now.” 

The self-pity wafts off of him. It boils Quynh’s blood. She will not be foiled by him. Not when she's so close.

She marches forward and buries a hand in his overgrown hair, pulling his head up, and gets in close. 

“I need your help,” she intones, staring straight at him, “and I am not waiting for you to finish crying for yourself. You know who I am. I know fragments of who you are. I need to get back to them. I don’t care about your banishment and I do not care about your guilt.” There is an ember of rage inside of her fanning to a flame. “Sit up and tell me what you know.” 

***

Nile catches her breath, her hands on her knees. 

They’ve come to a rest by a bench in the park, the wind soughing through the leaves above them. Beside her, Nicky is stretching again. It’s good weather for running – cool enough not to overheat, with the sun still shining above the leaves. Further down the path, a couple of kids shriek as they play. A couple of other joggers pass them. People talking fills the air. 

Around them, it is a Friday afternoon. Around them, there is life.

When Nile straightens back up, her loose earphones clank against her chest. Nicky, in some feat of sociopathy, does not run with music. She muses over this -- she’s seen him murder rooms full of people, watched him wash caked-on blood off his hands, but this is still what scares her most about him. 

It’s been over a week.

“Any word from Copley?” 

The side of Nicky’s mouth twitches. “No. He hasn’t even responded yet.” 

“Useful.” Nile drawled. She grows serious. “You think he’ll even be able to find anything?”

“He found us, didn’t he?” Nicky’s neutral face and tone belie what’s beneath. 

He still isn’t best pleased with the vision board. The scrutiny made him uncomfortable, but Nicky saw it for what it was: when they had been discussing whether it was actually a good idea to hire Copley, he’d argued it would be a liability at best not to have that scrutiny on their side. His eyes scan across the park. 

“All we can do is wait.” He says, smiling at a kid who looks up at him as she cycles by. 

Nile waves half-heartedly at her, too. “I wish he’d just get us an answer.” She hops from foot to foot. They’ve already looped the park once, but she’s been on a military base for the past eight months. “Again?” 

It’s weird, the domesticity; the normality sandwiched between everything that’s happened.

Nine weeks ago, Nile threw a man out of a skyscraper window and an hour later was sleeping against a car window. 

Today, she’s jogging past a playground. 

It was a while coming. 

That first week, nothing. 

At the four week mark, stowed away in Ireland, Andy grew restless again. Nile remembers Joe’s tone as they argued. The rapidfire of: “I’m ready.” “I’m fucking not. Neither is Nicky. Nile--” “Nile can speak for herself. Nile?” “No, I can’t, Andy. Not this soon. I’m sorry.” “Was it all for nothing?” “What?” “Joe. We survived and you don’t want to do anything about it?” “I’m not going through hell again just to solve you going stircrazy, boss. We need a fucking break. All of us.” 

So they’d up and landed in Berlin. 

It’s been an informative five weeks. Nile has learnt not to be in the kitchen whenever Nicky’s cooking and that Joe and Andy are good as dead before 10am, but that they would tell you 9. 

They’re all still on high alert. But it’s better than the first few weeks, when Andy jumped at every bang, and Joe and Nicky refused to leave each other’s sides. 

They’ve come to a halt again, Nile taking a water break. 

She still hasn’t stopped having nightmares. 

She still hasn’t grown used to it. Any of it. Every other thought, she wants to text the group chat. Every other night she sees the sergeant telling her to pack her bags, his face hard and voice cold. She sees her bags already packed by the other girls, already having sent her off in their minds. 

Here, she realizes Nicky is saying her name. Reality trickles back in. “Shit, sorry -- yeah?” 

He’s got his brows furrowed at his phone.

“Copley’s written.” 

***

Joe is minding his business when Andy pulls out the chair opposite him. 

“What are you not telling me?” Andy leans forward. Her eyes are hard and cold as moonstones. 

“Sorry?” He raises a brow. The knitting needles in his hands are still. 

“What are you not telling me?” She repeats. 

Well, they made it a week. He still deflects. “Is there supposed to be something?” 

Andy raises her brows. 

Joe just holds her gaze. 

A moment later, Andy huffs a laugh and looks down at the table and leans back again.

“I only ask,” she says, tone easy, “because Nile pretends she doesn’t know what I mean when I ask her. She’s a good liar, I’ll give her that. I asked Nicky and he knocked over a tower of soup cans at Aldi. I can…” 

She scoffs, the sound frustrated. “You’re all edging around something. What is it?” 

“Andy…” Joe sighs. 

The smile drops from her face, and when she asks again, it is a plea: “Joe. What is it?” 

“Quynh’s free. We only just found out.” Nile says from the doorway. Her voice makes Joe jump. She and Nicky must have returned. She’s still in her joggers, her phone and earphones bundled in hand. Nicky comes up at her shoulder, slips past. 

Quick as a whip, Andy twists around in her chair. Her tone is raw, frantic. “What?” 

Her wide eyes are fixed on Nile as she moves to the head of the table. There’s something feral in her gaze, something crashing behind the blue. 

They fucked up. They should have told her.

This comes into sharp clarity, and fast. 

Joe feels guilt twist his gut. 

They should have told her. 

“I had a dream in Budapest. Copley’s heard from people.” Here, Joe’s gaze snaps to Nicky who just nods. 

“Who the fuck are people?” 

“Some of his ex-CIA pals. They’ve heard things about a trip in Norway.”

“We have to go.”

Joe aches. “We have no idea where in Norway, no idea who in Norway.” 

“We’ll find them. We have to get her back.” 

“Andy, focus.”

“Oh, fuck you. All of you.” Andy snaps. She bolts up, grabbing her jacket off the back of her chair. She stares at them all, her blue eyes burning. 

When she leaves, she lets the door slam. 

***

They didn’t tell her.

In a red haze, Andy cuts down the street. 

She was pulled up by another fucking boat. More people, more people with things to cut out of her. And more than that, there was irony there that wasn’t lost on Andy – in a sick way, it had come full circle. 

A ship took Quynh from Andy, and a ship would return her to her. 

Water had given Quynh to Andy, and then taken her from her. 

Her throat is tight. 

They knew. 

Joe, Nicky, Nile – all of them knew there was a chance she was out there again and they didn’t even fucking deign to tell Andy. 

Even now, she feels her fingers itching to take off and comb the seas again, turning each ship inside out until she finds Quynh again and has her safe in her arms again; feels the flames snaking up the inside of her stomach lining, rage flooding her again, that same blinding drive crawling back in. 

The concrete clinks under her boots. 

It stings. More than anything, it stings. 

Andy has waited for 400 years to hear a break, a new lead, anything that could get her back to Quynh. 

They had more than a lead. They saw her. It’s the most information they’ve ever had

And they didn’t even tell Andy. 

She drifts through the street til 2am. 

Andy squares herself to what awaits within. She puts a leash on her anger, holds it firm and tight where it burns in her ribcage. 

Clicking into place, the key shifts in the lock. Andy walks back into the apartment. 

Their heads snap towards her the second she enters. Concern plain on their faces. 

It makes her want to punch something. 

The silence in the room stretches and spreads itself thin, coating each of them. She knows what she has to say. They don’t.

“You should have told me.” Her voice is gravel by design, too hard to crack, too even to ever be ragged. “None of you had a fucking right to keep it from me. Who do you think you fucking are? I thought you’d  
know, Nile, that you need to mention Quynh coming back up from the bottom of the ocean. At the very fucking least, I expected one of you,” this she directs to Joe and Nicky, “to say something. Fucking anything. Not just sit on the information and wait for something to crawl out to you.” 

Nile, to her credit, doesn’t recoil. The hurt is plain in her eyes, but her jaw stays firm. There’s a resigned, pained tilt to Joe’s mouth. Nicky keeps his eyes on Andy. 

It hangs in the air, dragging like a wet dress on a washing line. 

“I deserved to fucking know. I’m not going to play these games, and if you are – any of you – then get the fuck out.” Now, what’s been itching at her, spoken like a harsh bite: “You don’t trust me that much?”

It’s Joe who speaks. His voice is tempered, at first. “We only just confirmed that she made it out. We had no idea what you’d do. You could have spent a year tailing someone who’s still at the bottom of the sea, or you could’ve killed yourself – and since you need the reminder: permanently.” 

“So you decided to make the choice for me?” She barks. It’s not fair – his reply is answer enough; he was keeping her safe, all of them were, but that doesn’t mean she has it like it in the slightest. Her throat hurts. There’s a dull throbbing behind her sinuses. 

“If it was between sitting on Quynh until we knew she was actually free, and you drowning yourself off the coast of Scotland again, yes!” Joe snaps right back. 

Andy opens her mouth, but Nile cuts in: “Andy, we thought you’d take off the second we told you, and you did. I don’t know even where she got pulled up, where she was taken. Wasn’t much we could do. You knowing wouldn’t have changed that.”

“We didn’t want to raise our hopes for nothing.” Nicky says. He means they didn’t want to raise hers.

The kindness – because that’s what it is, in its own fucking way – scrapes at her, grazes her skin and makes red flash before her eyes. If this is their kindness, Andy thinks, they can shove it up their asses. 

She shouldn’t have to remind them. That’s what makes her voice low and dangerous, her stare piercing, when she speaks again. 

“We’re down to four. I thought you three would grasp that. I fucking need you to if we’re going to make it through the year alive.” She’s the only one who has to worry that particular point. Wisely, none of them mention it. “Never keep shit like that from me again.” A tight sigh escapes from her flared nostrils. “Understood?” 

They nod. Joe’s still got an unhappy set to his face. 

“Good. Where is she?” Even to her own ears, her voice is desperate.

“I told you. I don’t know. I haven’t dreamed about her since Budapest.” Nile repeats. “I saw a tiny bit of the inside of the ship, I saw her on the deck, but I didn’t see where they were heading.” 

Andy clenches her jaw. 

They don’t even know where she is. 

“It’s like I said, Andy. We know next to nothing,” Joe says, “we’re flying blind.” 

In that moment, Andy’s ready to start pinging off the walls. Rage pulls at her stomach. She can’t stay any longer. They’ll find Quynh, but they don’t have to do it from here. She drags a hand down her face, casts her eyes down at the floor. She needs to think. She needs quiet. To go to bed and not hear anything outside the window. A vague plan forms. “We’ll go to Austria. The Juliet safehouse. Figure something out there.”

“Austria?” Nile has a brow raised, a wary but inquisitive gleam in her eye; no doubt dreaming of Vienna. 

Joe stretches his brows up and lets out an exhale. He catches Nicky’s eye, then Andy’s. “Good a place as any.” 

***

Two shadows slip down the roof of a house in Surrey. 

One of them has an address scrawled on a napkin and folded in her pants. Watching Booker filch the information, she gets why Andy kept him around. 

Over the last three days, they haven’t spoken beyond what they absolutely have to say to each other. Booker is being tetchy with details on his exile. 

Grass rustles over their shoes as they cut through the woods, trying to put distance between them and the house. They were careful, but far better safe than sorry. 

There’s a dizzy elation to Quynh. They know where they’re sheltering. They’re within her reach, right at the tips of her fingers. 

Quynh realises Booker’s slowed to a halt. 

She frowns and turns back. “What?” She demands.

“Listen,” he starts, “there’s something you should know.” 

“It’s nothing that can’t wait, Sebastien.” Quynh says, tone frosty. They need to keep going. They have to. 

So, so close.

“No, I know. Listen, when it all happened, a couple of months back--”

“We don’t have the time. If you don’t want me to leave your body here for the next hiker to find, come the fuck on.” 

“Quynh.” 

His words trail off in the air. 

She’s already taken off again. 

Mouth pursing, Booker follows. 

***

The Juliet safehouse is not in Vienna. 

Nile, two weeks in, is doing her best not to be bitter about this fact. It’s only a storied cultural and artistic capital. It’s only the place John Quincy Adams made a name for himself. Andy has only bid them to stay at the farmhouse hours away until they’ve made some kind of headway. 

Nile is a bit bitter. 

But she gets why Andy chose this safehouse, clinging to the hillside and surrounded with loose sprinkings of pine trees. It is quiet. There is time to think. Space to think. God knows they’ve all needed it.

Andy cut the telephone lines the first day there, grumbling about local councils fixing things that don’t need fixing as soon as you step away. Nile had watched with her brows as high as they could go. She was very efficient. When Nile asked, Andy just shrugged and offered: “You cut enough military base comm lines, everything else is easy as shit.” Nile had shrugged and continued exploring. 

It’s a nice farm. Or at least, Nile assumes it’s a nice farm. The farmhouse is small, two-storey. She could live in the kitchen.

The only downside is that there’s, oh, nothing to do. 

Nile has been training. Sparring. Throwing punches and also knives. Learning. Distracting herself. There’s a lot to distract herself from, a lot she is doggedly not thinking about. 

To his credit, Nicky is still trying to teach her how to wield a sword – and to Nile’s credit, she’s only chopped one finger off during any of their little sessions. Andy trains her with whatever they have on hand whenever there’s a lull and Joe, ever patient, is still showing her how to use a scimitar. 

She gets up early most days. 

They’re surrounded by farmland that mostly belongs to other farmers. There’s some old warehouse a few miles away and other farmhouses dotted here and there, but other than that it really is just them. So, Nile runs in the mornings. 

Apart from it being Austria and not Parris Island, it almost reminds her of Basic. Losing herself in the running in a way she hadn’t been able to in London or in Berlin. 

The dew drags at her sneakers. It’s cold as shit. There’s a little thicket of trees behind the barn, spread out fine. The leaves swallow the sound of her sneakers against the path. Once she’s out on her way back to the farmhouse, sometimes she stops by the barn; unhooks her earbuds and leans against the wood, tries to catch her breath. Sometimes, in the early-morning hush and with the barn hollow at her side, she prays. Today, she does. 

She doesn't kneel, but she twists so her back is against the barn, and inclines her head. Her hands come to a clasp. 

There's the soft pressure of her feet digging into her sneakers. The whisper of the grass around her. The smell of pine hanging in the biting air. The familiarity of the prayers slipping from her tongue, the way they are worn smooth as church steps: for her brother, her mother, for the three people down in the farmhouse at the bottom of the incline, for herself. 

When she's done, Nile takes another look down the path. The house – plaster stark and white against the dark wood, all of it tinted honey by the sunlight – is doll-sized from here, dwarfed by the mountains rolling up around it. For a moment, she stares down. And then she begins the descent. 

Joe is brooding down at the table when she enters. He and Nicky are nursing large mugs of coffee, but they look awake and offer her quick smiles. In contrast, eyes bleary, Andy is leaning against the sink and working her way through a bowl of oatmeal. 

“Morning,” Nile breathes, slipping past the table to get a glass of water. 

Andy moves out of the way of the tap. There’s a shaking to her head as she shifts. Her voice is still a morning rasp, and her eyes are slightly narrowed. “It’s pathological, the way you run.” 

“Not like there’s much else to do out here.” Nile says, flicking the tap off. She turns and shimmies her shoulders at Andy. “It’s good for you. Keeps your joints young. Keeps your blood flowing.” She puts as much pep into her voice as she can muster. She ends up sounding like a deranged home gym instructor. 

“Mmm. I’ll show you flowing blood.” Andy directs to her oatmeal, spooning more into her mouth. 

“Hag.” 

“Crone.” 

Nile takes a sip of water, grows serious. “Anything from Copley?” 

“No.” Nicky replies at the same time that Joe opens his mouth.

“You mistake him for someone who gives a shit about communication,” he deadpans. 

It’s been almost six weeks. 

The glass is cool against Nile’s forehead. blonde plays softly in her ears. Outside, the darkness is still and navy. The moon comes down in chunks. 

When she blinks, her dry eyes prickle. There’s a light pain that’s settled up at the crown of her head. She rubs at her left eye and finds the skin begins to twitch.

She hasn’t slept in 21 hours. 

This is what her dreams bring: the air rushing up all around her as she speeds down, glass all around her and a still-writhing body in his arms, water rushing into her nose, metal slicing into the fine skin of her throat and loosing a torrent of blood that Dizzy couldn’t staunch with her fingers. 

Sue her. She doesn’t want to put up with it tonight. 

In the alien dimension of Before, it was Dizzy who would be there for her when her life was being difficult. When most things were being difficult. After only two years, Nile had come to rely on her, on the facts of her smile and thereness on the other end of the phone. 

Things have shifted. Her problems are bigger than they used to be, and the last time Nile had seen Dizzy, she and the girls had packed Nile’s bag and all but shoved her out of the tent. For some sick reason, she aches to talk to her. Yell at her for turning her back on Nile. Send a text. Just a few words. Some voicemail that could be passed off as something she left months ago, something innocuous and ending with “See you Saturday!” that would let her know she’s still out there. 

When they crashed in Surrey, Copley had set the gears in motion for her to die in action. Her family will find out first. Once it’s all been fixed, the CAOs will find her mom for the second time in twenty years. It’ll be simple. Open and shut. 

She shuts her eyes. 

They had wanted to send her to Landstuhl. She had given them her life thinking it would be her only one and in return they wanted to lock her up in a blacksite and use her as a guinea pig.

Gently, she flexes her hands on her legs, feels the muscles stretching and tries to latch onto the feeling. It’s fine when she doesn’t think about it head-on – the fact that this time next year there’ll be a headstone in the cemetery with her name on it. 

Restlessness bubbles under her skin. 

She slips out of bed.

The farmhouse door shuts quietly, clicking softly into the hush. Nile treks to the cowshed, lights the lantern hanging up on one of the beams. The small space glows yellow. 

There’s a flaking table up against the far wall, a can of red spray paint crusted by one of the legs. 

Nile hauls one of the old wound bales of hay out from the corner. With a grunt, she pulls it onto the table. It’s not ideal target practice, but she doesn’t want the climb up to the barn. When she’s arranged it, she sprays a rudimentary target on it, the fumes making her eyes water.

She picks up one of the knives and walks back. 

Soon, there’s a loose ring of tears in the plastic; all wide of the mark. She sighs and readjusts on her feet, holding herself to the way Andy stood. 

A voice comes from behind her. “Stop thinking of this like it’s the Marines.” 

Nile whips around, her every muscle tensed and wound to fight. 

It’s just Andy; standing in the doorway, wrapped in a huge plaid jacket. 

“Shit, you scared me,” she breathes and turns back to her makeshift target. 

“Stop thinking of this like it’s the Marines.” Andy repeats. 

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are. You’re not being graded, Nile. Take a break if you fucking need one.”

“Don’t fucking patronize me.”

“You’re pushing yourself too hard.” 

Nile scoffs, takes aim again. “Am I?” 

When she lets the knife fly, it tears through the dark plastic and hits the bullseye. Hay scratches out and tips off the table. Pride pushes up inside of Nile. It’s gone in the next moment. She walks to the table to retrieve the knife. The hay crumbles around her hand when she shoves it in, feeling for the knife handle. 

Maybe it’s because she’s staring at the wall and not at Andy. “He offered us another mission. Copley. Some kind of stolen cargo being held at some abandoned farmhouse. Medicine, I think.” Nile continues to rummage. 

It’s Andy’s turn to scoff. “He wants us to get some medicine for him?” 

Nile shrugs, casts a glance over her shoulder. “Easing us back in slowly, right?” Her fingers find purchase on the handle. She digs it out and turns back around.

Andy’s got her arms folded across her chest in a way that says they aren’t done talking about army training, shoulders held square beneath her jacket. “We’ll talk about the mission in the morning. You need to sleep.” 

Only, Nile is finally in the groove. The rhythm she hadn’t been able to find before, the control of her throwing arm. There’s a soreness to her bicep that makes her feel like she’s really there. She’s too wired to sleep. “Just go back to bed, Andy.”

Unruffled, Andy says: “I know what you’re doing.” Her tone is plain. “Working yourself to the bone won’t change that you’re here. You won’t wake up in Chicago.” 

“You don’t remember what it’s like.” Nile shoots back. 

“I remember feeling lost. You’re looking for control you won’t find.” She hates the way Andy keeps her tone calm, the smoothness of it. 

“I’m dealing.”

“Then act like it.” That’s a snap. 

Andy leaves her in the cowshed.

Nile stays until she can consistently hit the bullseye. 

When she reemerges, she has to blink against the rising sun. 

Nile’s sword clatters to the ground. Again. It falls in the grass with a soft thud. She groans, leaning down to pick it up. It’s not heavy, but her arms still protest – her muscles are sore. 

She rolls back up her spine and stretches. There’s a lazy breeze. It drifts over her warm skin. 

“Remember, you’re creating distance,” Nicky says, squinting at her against the sun, “you’re making space between yourself and your opponent.” 

“I know.” She gets the principle. She gets the motions. It’s just sticking them together; getting her hands to listen to her tired wrists listening to her sore arms listening to her brain. Footwork is getting easier, but it’s little comfort. It also doesn’t help that Nicky has a head start of about 700 years and, two hours in, has only just broken a sweat. “It’s just putting it together.”

Nicky makes a sympathetic noise and absentmindedly spins his own longsword, handle twisting over the back of his hand in one smooth fluid motion before settling once more, gaze cast down the path the way they came. 

“See! God – how do you do that?” Nile bursts out. 

She sees him cringe, suddenly aware of what he just did. But it’s funny -- Nile can _see_ him click into teacher mode. 

“It’ll be easier once you’ve got a grip on balancing the blade as a whole. Try holding – ” He’s cut off by Andy and Joe emerging up the path. 

Nile raises her brows. “Hi?” 

They’re holding food. Her priorities crystallise. 

Once they've eaten, Nile stretches her legs out and turns her face up to the sun. 

“Copley asked again,” Joe says. 

That makes her sit up again. Judging by the resigned line of Andy’s mouth, she already knew. 

Nicky raises a brow. “What did you tell him?” 

“The usual: _'Absolutely not, are you insane?'”_

Relief she wasn’t expecting floods her system. Nile lets out a soft breath. 

She realises Andy is watching her and looks away. 

On the way back, they cut through the fields and come to the farmhouse road.

There’s a car parked by the gate. Empty. Clean. 

Andy’s gaze flicks to the others. Her orders are to the point. “Perimeters. Meet back at the farmhouse.” 

With short nods, the four of them crest the gate and disperse across the property. Andy heads northwest, towards the old barn; Nile cuts a path southeast, Joe southwest, and Nicky northeast. 

The grass shushes against her boots, dragging across the scuffed leather. She forces herself to keep moving forward, her gun a grounding weight in her hand. 

It’s batting to rain – the wind whips at her hair as she stalks up to where the old cowshed and the barn sit, cold lashes against the side of her face. 

They’ve been careful. Copley is the only person who knows where they are. Andy will be surprised if it’s anything more than wayward hikers. 

And still.

Discomfort needles up her spine. The hairs on her neck prickle up, one by one. 

She continues the ascent. 

The doors to the barn swing on their hinges. 

Andy comes to a halt. She frowns. 

The wood creaks; the rusting hinges scrape. The harsh sound carries on the wind. 

Only now does she slow down as she heads forward. Her steps come with learned precision. Her gun stays lowered. The trigger is smooth beneath her index finger. 

She steps over the threshold. 

The barn is empty. The walls stretch up around her. There are nests in the corners the pigeons have reclaimed. Inside the barn, the sound of the wind is muffled. 

All Andy hears is the solid clap of wood everytime one of the doors swings back against the barn. The sound reverberates off the walls. 

Someone is watching her. The feeling of it prickles up her skin, up her spine, settles in a cold pool at the top of her head. 

She steps out of the shadows.

Andy has to fight to stay standing. 

When she finally gets the name out, it’s barely more than a breath:

“Quynh.” 

***

Andromache doesn’t cower. 

She might as well. Quynh can barely think straight. Her head feels like cracked eggs. 

“How – ”

“Marine research off of Norway.” 

Some flicker of cognizance registers on Andy’s face. 

“How did you know – ”

“Booker.” 

“Quynh, I– ”

She cuts her off, fury blossoming fresh. "You gave up on me, Andy. I did not.” 

It is now that Andy shrinks from her. 

Guilt doesn’t sit well on her. Not this kind of guilt, with the way her eyes have widened and pulled her in on herself. 

Quynh feels a tug of remorse for what she's about to do. She doesn't have it in herself to listen to it. Not now.

When she lunges, Andy comes up to meet her.

A jab to her lower ribcage. A muffled grunt, a half-hearted attempt to throw Quynh off. A tightened grip. An angry knee. Another choked off grunt.

It is Quynh who pushes her away, now. Her hands grasp Andy's face. 

"Fight back." Quynh says. Or maybe she doesn't. 

Maybe the way she glares into Andy's eyes until the latter's gaze hardens, the way her thumbs are brushing up against where Andy's hair is beginning to grow out and curl – where each strand comes like flint against steel where it brushes Quynh’s skin – is enough.

Andy's head comes forward before Quynh has time to process.

Pain blackens her vision.

She reels backwards, entire body tense, ready, furious livewire.

The second Andy's hand jabs out, Quynh finds her wrist through the reverberating reality and grips until she can feel the knob of her wrist. Everything sharpens with freezing clarity. 

From there, they meet each other hit for hit. 

Quynh does not recognise how Andromache fights anymore. 

New quirks catch her off guard, send a fist into her core, strike where she isn’t expecting it. 

Still, she gives her a fight. She drives her back. The beams of the barn stretch up around them. 

Quynh catches Andy off guard. 

With a loud thwack, Quynh thuds Andy up against one of the wooden beams. Her forearm is a deadbolt against Andy’s chest, the other maneuvering the knife from her left sleeve. With a flick, Quynh takes the handle and lays the blade against the cords of her throat.

Her pulse hammers above the glinting metal.

Beneath her forearm, Andy heaves for breath as Quynh does the same. 

Beyond that, the air is silent. 

Two months.

374 years.

Her vision fuzzes. Her chest is on fire. 

She’s inches from her face. 

There are lines feathering from Andy’s wary eyes now, worry lines indented between her brows. Her mouth is a hard line. Her nostrils flare as she breathes in. Her slate eyes are trained on Quynh’s. In them, too, Quynh sees exhaustion; deeper than she’s ever seen on Andromache. Something puzzles within her beneath the rage – something has shifted in Andy, something deep. 

Breath growing quick, Quynh tightens her grip and sets her jaw. 

“I waited for you,” Quynh bites out, finally. “For a hundred years.” Maybe more. Maybe less. Each moment beneath the waves, lungs flooded and airways drowning, welded together into one long nightmarish moment. From where she had been dumped, she could just about see the sky darkening and lighting above the water. It didn’t take long for her to stop keeping track. It took longer for her to stop hoping that each next time would be the one. “Every time I drowned, I expected I’d finally see you swimming down to me. How long did it take for you to abandon me, Andromache?” 

Andy’s head falls back against the beam. The fight drains from her. Her shoulders drop. “We looked for you. We did. Eighty years to the day.” 

Two things register: 

1\. Eighty years. Not even a century. That’s all the time Andy deigned to give her. 

2\. It’s a plea – despite her voice staying even, staying deep, it is a plea. And Quynh despises her for it. 

Quynh sees red. She slams her forearm against Andy’s chest with renewed force. “Is that supposed to comfort me?” 

Though the fight has left Andy, here her eyes spark. “No.”

But it’s not a challenge. Quynh isn’t sure of the woman before her – so devoid of flame, shrinking from her mistake and from the woman made victim because of it. And now she won’t even do Quynh the dignity of matching her. 

Her voice is a breath. “Quynh, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” 

It is the final straw. Andy’s pulse thuds in the cords of her neck against the blade. 

Quynh leans in close, chin just grazing Andy’s shoulder and hisses: “You left me down there and afforded yourself the luxury of guilt, Andromache,” she pulls back, stares at Andy, her set jaw and resigned, tender eyes flitting over Quynh’s face, “the 300 years you spent pitying yourself, I spent dreaming of this moment,” almost, she thinks, thinking of the way Andy will drop and revive and Quynh will finally be able to do it again, “remember it, Andromache. I –”

In a rush, the air is forced out of her. 

Oh. 

Pain ricochets up her spine from the point where the knife has hit her. 

Whoever threw it threw it well. Blackness begins flickering in. 

One hit. 

Through the haze, she’s somewhat impressed. 

She’s slumped against an angry Andy now, who is bellowing something over her head. One thing registers: her hands cup Quynh’s elbows, grip gentle as it keeps her upright. 

Andy’s hands are warm.

And Quynh slips down. 

***

She rubs at the rope marks around her wrists. 

Neither she or Booker woke up bound. 

Quynh even had her coat on, the one she had shucked off in the shadows of the barn so it wouldn’t weigh her down as she fought. 

Quynh shunts figuring all that out down her list of priorities, which currently stand: numbers one through fifty – Andy is mortal. 

She draws her coat around herself a little tighter, the indigo fabric soft beneath her fingers. It rustles over her jumper. 

Coat pulled snug, she continues to pace, frowning down at the worn stone beneath her boots. They – being Booker and Quynh – are in what appears to be an old cowshed. 

She probably should’ve let Booker talk more. 

Even so.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Quynh bursts out, whirling on her heel to face him. 

He stares up at her through his fingers, features heavy and eyes the colour of wet concrete. With a sigh, he drags his hand down his face and shrugs. It is flippant enough to make Quynh stride over to where he’s sitting against the wall. 

That makes him say: “What was there to say, Quynh? Hm?” 

That makes her kick the wall and resume pacing. 

He had tried to tell her. She had told him there wasn’t time. She had ignored it. 

She shuts her eyes.

She sees the skin soft pulsing above her knife. 

Quynh kicks the wall again.

***

“I had it under control.” Andy bites out.

“You were going to let her kill you.” Nile retorts. Her heart still hasn’t quite calmed down, but now that they’re back on the farmhouse porch, Andy out from under Quynh’s grip and the latter currently coming to in the old cowshed, Nile has the wherewithal to be angry. 

“I had it under control.” She repeats, leaning over the table to make her point. She pushes herself back with a furious sigh. “You should have let me deal with her.” 

At this point, Joe sighs from where he’s leaning against the wall and repeats, “Andy, she had a knife to your throat.” His tone is distant, his gaze vaguely directed to the building housing Booker and Quynh. For a moment, he looks away from it and meets Nicky’s eyes. 

Nile looks away. Her skin still crawls to remember the way the two of them had stood frozen in the doorway of the barn, the way she had to push past them and aim the knife as best as she could. 

Just as she looks away, Andy kicks the wall and then slides down it, her feral eyes set on the shed, too.

They’re going in circles. 

From where Nicky’s leaning against the porch railing, he taps his fingers against the wood a couple of times. 

The three of them stare at the low, small building. Nile wants to scream. 

It’s a fucking mess. Booker and Quynh are in the old cowshed, unbound at Andy’s command. It was the best place they could think to put them at the time – well, the first place they had passed. Now, obviously, 

Nile thinks that the cellar would’ve been better. But she doesn’t want to wrangle an awake Quynh. And it’s an exposed building, smaller than you’d expect, not far from the farmhouse, with nothing to shelter the path of breaking out. They have an unobstructed view from where they’re standing.

A tight exhale drags out of Nile. She puts her hands on her waist, tries to focus. Just to change the topic, she asks: “What are we supposed to do with them now?” 

“Leave them here and get on a train?” Nicky throws out, looking back over at Nile. 

His tone isn’t light but it’s neutral – Andy still cuts in quick. “No.” 

He scoffs, and, fire in his tone, says: “Andy, we can’t– ”

“We’re not doing this.” 

Here, Joe’s face stays lax but he chimes in: “But we’ll have to decide on something eventually. The best thing may yet be fucking off and leaving them to it – she had you under a blade and Nile was the only one who had the fucking wherewithal to do anything about it. We won’t be able to if it comes to it. If we have to make the decision, boss– ” 

“You’ll what?” Much too fast, Andy gets in his face. The tight way she holds her shoulders and way she gets into his space radiates fury. “What will you do, Joe?” 

Nile rubs her face. She is tired of today. She wants a nap. 

Nicky steps forward, a frown pulling on his features. “Andy, we’ll do what we have to do.” Exasperation cuts through his tone. He holds her gaze and doesn’t soften when he says, “remember that they were our friends too.”

“Yeah,” Joe scoffs, “we’re not exactly thrilled either, boss.” 

There’s an incredulous, bitter laugh from Andy. “Spare me.” 

They don’t have time for this. Nile cuts in: “I am _thrilled_ for y’all, but where does all of that leave us about the fact we’ve got two immortal warriors in the fucking cow stable who have good reason for wanting to kill the only one of us who can actually be killed?” 

“We can take shifts watching them overnight.” Nicky says. “We’ll deal with them tomorrow.” 

At that, Andy storms into the house. The door claps shut behind her.

Nile wheels around. “Are we just gonna let her go?” 

“You got a better idea?” 

Nile doesn’t kick the wall, but it’s a close thing. 

She does not have a better idea. 

A year ago, family drama would mean complaining to Dizzy or Jordan for a couple of hours and in return getting the latest dish on Dizzy’s relatives. A year ago, family drama would mean it involved Nile’s mom and brother. 

A year ago, everyone in this scenario was mortal. 

Nile splashes her face with water. She stares at herself in the mirror. 

There are bags under her eyes. 

She looks the way she did her first weeks of Basic, strung out, her eyes both tired and too alert all at once. 

Andy’s words ring in her head. 

She goes downstairs to take first watch. 

***

For centuries, Andy had dreamed, begged, all but prayed to see those mahogany eyes again, and hours ago they had been fixed on her and burning with a kind of rage that could bring a city to the ground. 

She can’t square the past few hours – having Quynh in front of her again and then all of a sudden not. 

She can still feel the blade against her neck. 

Memories rise in her like bile. Now that she’s found them, all Andy can do is think about when they were looking for Quynh. 

Early in the search, at some point in 1654, Andy slipped out as morning broke.

The path down to the beach dug into her bare feet. Above her, gulls circled with their shrill cries. The weak sun shone off the stone-grey water. She shucked her shirt off, staring out at the wide horizon. 

The water lapped at her skin like ice. She waded further in, her clothes left on the sand. They would only weigh her down and make her colder once she got out. Beneath her feet, the sand shifted and sent  
pinpricks of cold into the soles of her feet.

She took a deep breath and dove in.

Cold water rushed over her face and tugged her hair up. Beneath the waves the world was a murky slate. Andy forced her eyes open. The saltwater stung but it didn’t phase her. Not anymore.

She cut through the water, the muscles in her arms pinching in the cold as she adjusted, heading deeper.

A dark shape on the seafloor caught her eye and she dove down, greeting that familiar wooziness with ease, to make sure it was part of the ship. It was a piece of wood, splintered and chipping paint. Once upon a time it had been red. Now the colours had bled from it.

She was approaching the wreck.

She pressed further down.

The water began to press in. Her blood thundered in her ears.

The wreckage sprawled out on the seafloor, sticking up like an urchin. It was a mass of dark shapes and splintering wood, littering the seafloor around it with the contents of the hull too heavy to float up.  
Silhouettes on the sand marked the sailors who had not got out. Their arms lay limp and bloated by their sides, clothes billowing out. Andy took them in for one moment and continued to swim above them. Her eyes scanned over the ocean floor.

The hull had split open and poured foodstuffs and chests. Writhing fish clouded what was left off the food. A ream of fabric had settled on the sand far below Andy.

She cut around the rock. The deck fell so that it faced away from her, further into the surf.

They would not have kept her below deck.

Her vision began to fuzz. She crested the side of the ship. Long planks stretched across the deck – those that remained intact were dark with water, the rest chipping up and having smashed apart. Bundles of rope coiled on the seafloor. They were curled on the sand at the bottom of what had once been the side of the ship. Towards the mast, things had caught in the lip of the side, barrels piling up. The rest of the side held little things like this, too. Other than that, it was barren.

Andy's throat squeezed.

She continued to float above it, eye straining on the sand. But she knew.

The seafloor was littered with little bits of cargo and bodies here and there. It was cluttered, it was messy and held all sorts, but no iron coffins. Andy would have seen the iron maiden by now if she was going to. 

Another dead end. All dead ends.

They didn't even have to search for the surviving crew. They wouldn't provide them with anything.

Andy's head felt like it was stuffed with cloud. Reality was beginning to slip away. She had started pushing up against her limit.

With tears pressing up against the backs of her pupils, Andy swam back up. The water rushed against her skin. She felt her joints stiffening angrily.

She broke the surface. Blood roared in her ears, her ear canals sore. The wind swept against her face. It bit her where the saltwater was drying.

Her feet worked against the water, pedalling up and down. The water stretched out around her. A moment to catch her breath, wait for her head to settle and her bones to stop feeling so sharp. These things had  
become familiar to her. The way she would drown if she tried to swim before letting them pass had also become familiar to her.

Slowly, the tension in her joints slipped away and her eyesight returned to normal. Her head once more began to feel like it was attached to her body. She turned her gaze towards the beach again.

A figure stood on it. Barely legible – Andy strained her eyes. She only saw that the person was standing by her clothes.

With a deep breath, she pushed her arms forward. Her legs kicked out behind her. She swam back to the shore. Below the waves, the breaking wood continued to creak.

The wind was picking up. Resistance came from the water and the building waves as she tried to swim back.

A sour taste filled Andy's mouth.  
The figure – who had since sat down, knees pulled up and wrapped with his arms – was beginning to come into focus. The closer Andy got to the shore, the clearer she could make out his dark curls and brown eyes, the way his eyes were trained on her and above them his dark brows pulled together in a frown. 

Her feet began to brush against a layer of freezing water. Carefully, Andy straightened her legs out and found icy sand beneath her toes. She waded through the water, the water lapping at her cheeks. She was close enough now. On the shore, Joe had a slant to his mouth.

The water began to grow shallow. The water came up to her lips, then her shoulders, then her knees, and then she was back on the sand. Wind whipped at her wet skin, icing her as it dried her. 

Joe was holding a towel. Squinting against the early sunlight, he reached it out to her. She took it and scrubbed her face, running it over her damp skin.

"You couldn’t have left a note?” His tone was lighter than Andy expected. 

Still, she ignored him. She busied herself with pulling her shirt on, brushing it down where it hit her thighs, and fastening the buttons.

When she didn’t reply, Joe intoned: “You’re being reckless.”

It was blunt. His tone cut none of the levity it had done moments ago. Andy expected nothing less. She didn't reply. The buttons were smooth beneath her fingers. She pulled her trousers on. “I don’t care, Joe.”

“You don’t care, but I do. Nicky does.”

Something scraped inside of her.

“I’m not doing this with you.” Andy bit out. "That ship was the first proper lead we'd got in months. You and Nicky can't fucking dive. I was saving us time." Andy felt her jaw muscles skipping. She looked away  
from Joe and out at the sea, at the jagged rock just poking out from the surf. "It was a dead end. Just a merchant ship. The haul they were running their mouths about looks like Norwegian ore. We’ll leave the survivors. There’s no point trying to track them now.”

Andy felt his eyes on her. She met his furious gaze with equal measure. They’d argued, spitting back and forth for about an hour. At the time she thought it was the angriest either of them had ever been with each other.

Time heals some wounds and deepens others, because she was proven wrong thirteen years later when she came to on a thin strip of Scottish sand, lungs still aching where they’d burned with seawater, Joe and 

Nicky standing above her. 

“Drowning yourself won’t bring Quynh back. You won’t fill your lungs with water and wake up with her beside you again,” Joe had bit out somewhere in the middle of that argument, “killing yourself won’t give you the control you want. Nothing will!” 350 years later, Andy had found herself repeating it to Nile, because Joe had been right; as he usually was, even when she hated to admit it. 

Andy resented them both for a while; for their patient silence, their even more patient attempts at conversation, their stubbornness to keep going and refusal to abandon Quynh or Andy in the search for her. 

She resented them in the same way she hated each door she knocked on, the question always on her lips – “Has anything washed up here recently?” – all the way up and all the way down the British coast; in the same way she came to hate the French shoreline and then the Dutch coast as they moved further north. 

It had been an obvious decision, in the end. Each coast trawled, every dive taken that could yield anything, every story of a shipwreck followed and investigated. 

The last straw came late in 1724.

A woman in Brest all but recognised Andy on her second tour round from a story her grandma had told her, about a tall woman with eyes like the sea sleeping in front of their fire for a night and disappearing the next morning as if she had never been there. 

Andy had exhausted any and all new leads about 30 years ago. All that she had left was retreading old ground. Every new day was a wall. She was having difficulty seeing over or beyond them. 

Most of all, Joe and Nicky were beginning to fray. They tried to keep it from her, but she saw it eating away at them – the constant dead ends and losses. The last time she had seen them, they were tight-lipped, the bags under Nicky's eyes more pronounced than usual.

So, she had called them out to Dublin, laid it out before them, and spent the rest of the year negotiating treaty disputes. It was easier to shove it down when she was alone – so she didn’t cross paths with Joe and 

Nicky for another 25 years. 

And that was it.

Until Booker.

Joe joins Nile on the porch. She took the first watch. 

When he offers her a bowl of soup, she unplugs her earphone and takes it. “You lifesaver. Thank you.” 

He sits down on the deck with her. He balances his own bowl on his knee. “Any movement?” 

“No,” Nile spoons more soup into her mouth, tries not to burn herself. “Like I said, I think we’re wasting our time. Where are they gonna go? And like -- would it be such a bad thing if they left?” 

“Maybe not.” Joe murmurs, gaze fixed on the cowshed. 

“Why do you think they’re here?”

“You mean other than wanting to slit our throats for abandoning Quynh? Don’t know.” 

“If they were sent… Copley would’ve had to say something to someone, right?” 

Joe’s brows go up even further, if that’s possible. “You think he wouldn’t?” 

Nile grins, dips her head. “Good point.” 

“How are you holding up?” 

“Could be better.” 

“You want me to take over?”

“That’s alright.” Nile narrows her eyes at the squares of light in the cowshed door. “You?” 

Joe shrugs as he chews. “Better. I’m sorry about the barn.” 

“It’s fine. I’m just glad I got there on time.”

Judging by the silence that follows, that’s sent their thoughts down the same rabbithole. Nile sees a barn floor soaked in blood, Andy’s body lying broken beside a blade discarded in Quynh’s wake. 

They meet each other’s eyes and laugh at themselves. 

Nile says what’s on her mind. “You know, we used to have this one guard on base? Real nasty guy, but he didn’t let anything slip past him.” He was also coincidentally the reason for Nile’s reminder to keep it respectful, following an canteen argument between him and Dizzy. “I keep thinking about him. We were scared of him. And it wasn’t just him. There was so much fear there -- and they still expected us to operate like normal.” 

“Shitty system.”

“You don’t realise how bad it is until you’re out, huh?” 

He watches her. “I don’t suppose you do.” 

Nile looks back at the building. "What do you think we should do?" 

Andy's voice comes from behind them. “We should just let them go.” 

“You’re out here?” Joe gasps theatrically as he twists around to look at her.

“We should let them get in the car and leave. We’ll leave the country. Find somewhere else to lay low. Just let them go.” 

Nile’s face scrunches. “You’ve waited 400 years to get her back and you’re just going to let her go?” 

“Yes.” Andy says without hesitation, jaw tight. “If it’s that important, she’ll come back, or I’ll find her. Simple.” 

“Not really.” Nile’s head is tilted. “You do get how that’s not that simple, right?”

“We have to make sure they’re the only ones who know we’re here,” Joe adds, “I’m going to take my paints this time if we have to abandon this safehouse.” 

“We let them go.” Andy repeats. Joe’s brows twitch. Nile wants to argue, but the look in Andy’s eye tells her not to. 

It takes a while to persuade Nicky. 

Once he’s been talked into it, the four of them step down the deck and to the low building. 

They crack the padlock to the cowshed. 

Andy’s shoulders are tight. 

Inside, Quynh is pacing. Booker is slumped against the wall, half-asleep. 

They both look up. 

Andy raises a hand to silence them. “Leave.”

Quynh’s eyes are huge. “Andy--”

“Leave.” Her face is a blank and unreadable slate. “Just leave. Get in the car and go. I’m not interested in fighting either of you.” 

“Hey. About that,” Booker pipes up, “we botched getting the car –”

 _“You_ botched getting the car.” Quynh interrupts, voice icy. 

“– and it is, uh, being looked for right now. As in, there’s a police warrant out for it in two different countries.” 

Joe groans. “Perfect. Remind me why we kept you around?” 

Shrugging, Booker takes another swig from his flask. “Beats me.” His tone is dry, but there’s the shadow of a smile on his face.

“Shit.” Andy says. 

Nile looks from Booker to Quynh to Andy. She shrugs. “Guess you’re staying the night then?” 

Quynh lies down on the sofa. Booker collapses into one of the armchairs. 

They do spend the night. 

And then the next.

And the next. 

The air grows tense. 

Nile knows nothing good will come of it.

***

Andy watches Booker.

Booker had been unhinged when they found him. The war spat him back out in France, shattered and hating snow. By 1819, he had abandoned hope of seeing his family again, fearing himself broken, so he was drinking himself into oblivion in some backwater village. 

When they found him, he thought he was hallucinating – that his dreams had escaped his head and come to kill him where he lay in the local tavern’s pig slop. 

Eventually they persuaded him they were real. 

Eventually he joined them on a mission.

Andy remembers jolting awake, the yell still echoing off the shack walls. From their bedroll, Nicky was lowering a knife and Joe was frowning by his side. 

Her eyes darted around the room. “What happened?” 

It was just Booker, sitting up on his bedroll, hands in his hair, eyes feral. “Why haven’t they stopped?” He demanded, French slurred. 

“What?” Andy rubbed her face and sat up properly. 

“The dreams,” Booker croaked, “you said the dreams would stop. But I’m still dreaming of –” his voice broke and he buried his face in his hands “– I’m still dreaming.” 

Ice had settled in her stomach. The words dragged from her. “What did you see?” 

She already knew.

Here, Booker seemed to calm down. When he dragged his hands down his face, he was dead-eyed, staring at the wall. He let out a sigh and shook his head. “What I always see. I saw the woman in the water, drowning again and again.”

Andy couldn’t feel her hands. 

Joe and Nicky were staring at him. 

Words found their way to Andy. She recited: “She was – she was one of us. She was caught. They put her down there. 1645.”

Booker scoffed, felt for the wine bottle he had started the night before. “That’s what I have to look forward to? Two hundred years at the bottom of the sea?” 

But Andy had already stood up and stumbled out of the door. 

What Andy remembers of that night is the bile burning her throat as it came up, the sting of allowing herself to hope that Quynh could have passed on just to find peace, remembers the lost look on Booker’s face. 

She sees that look again on Nile’s face in Goussainville. 

Nine weeks on and the woman’s doing well, all things considered. Andy feels bad for her. Normally, they aren’t this bad after a mission. Normally, they have no reason to be. But it ate them down. And then Quynh got free. 

She sees the same look on her face in Austria.

In the kitchen, Nile’s reading a beaten Walter Isaacson book. 

Andy lifts the boxing gloves and her eyebrow. 

It’s less training than it is the two of them staying sharp.

She’s a good opponent. Andy enjoys sparring with her. She keeps Andy on her toes. 

Only, Nile is pulling her punches. 

Andy sees it in the ones she misses, the slight lack of force behind her fist before it comes down. It’s a shame. Her form is excellent. She could be getting some good hooks in, otherwise. 

And it’s pissing Andy off.

She leaves an opening, an obvious one, for a strike to her ribcage and Nile doesn’t take it. 

“Take a break,” Andy breathes, skipping back. As Nile makes her way over to her water bottle, she says, “you’re not taking any good hits.” 

Nile frowns, lifts the water bottle to her lips. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean you’d be doing really fucking well if you let yourself.” A muscle twitches in Andy’s jaw. “You scared of hurting me? You think I’m that fragile?”

“You?” Nile laughs, then tries to look serious: “Nah, I don’t think you’re fragile.” A smile breaks onto her face and she ducks behind her bobbing boxer gloves: “Unless you feel too fragile. Come on, hit me,” she eggs her on, light on her feet, “bet you can’t.” 

Andy doesn’t smile.

Nile continues to bob a little. “What’s up with you?” 

“I can fucking take it. Don’t treat me with kids gloves.”

“I’m not.”

“Then take this seriously.” 

“I’m not just going to beat you up, Andy.” Nile iterates. 

“I’m not trying to get you to beat me up.” She’s not. 

They start again. 

This time, she can’t think straight. Her mind snags on it, how Nile’s treating her differently -- how they’re all treating her differently. How her thigh still prickles when she jumps back too suddenly. 

She doesn’t realize until she’s in but she gets in closer, doesn’t actually land anything. Forces Nile to make a choice. 

Then she feels pain spiral through her jaw. Nile’s landed one on her. A good clean right hook. Andy stumbles back, adrenaline kicking in. 

“That good enough for you?” Nile’s voice is hard. “Don’t take out whatever shit you’ve got happening with Quynh, or being mortal again, or whatever the fuck is going on with you, on me.” 

She throws the boxing gloves down and marches back to the house. 

Andy is inside the barn, watching her go as her jaw grows sore. 

She brings a hand to the tender skin. 

The door to the farmhouse shuts as Nile disappears inside. 

It’s the most immature thing she’s done in centuries. 

Shit. 

Over the side of her jaw, the dull pain spreads. 

An hour later, Andy slips into the kitchen and through to the living room. 

Nile’s on the living room sofa, book on her chest, eyes glazed over as she stares at the window. She starts when Andy comes in, then realises who it is. She lets out a tight sigh and looks back out of the window. 

“Hey.”

“Anything else you wanted to add?” 

“Nile, I -- I’m sorry.” She holds her gaze. “You were right. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that. Not because of Quynh or this fucking body or any of it.” 

“It was fucked up.”

“It was.”

Nile purses her mouth, relaxes it again. “Thanks. Don’t do it again, I swear to God.” 

“I won’t.” Andy tries to grin. “What are you gonna do, kill me?” 

Nile lets out a huff, smiles a little. “Hag.”

Andy laughs. “Crone.” 

From behind them comes: “I was looking for you.” 

Quynh stands by the door. 

“What is it?” Andy asks. 

On the sofa, Nile sits up. 

Quynh’s eyes drag from Nile to Andy. To Nile, she says: “I won’t touch her.” And then she heads out to the back of the house. 

Andy meets Nile’s eye and shakes her head when she raises a brow. “I’ll be fine.” 

As soon as Andy steps out, Quynh asks: “Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“Didn’t exactly get the chance.” 

There’s a frantic note in her voice buried deep. Andy wouldn’t hear it if she hadn’t spent two thousand years with it. “I would have killed you not knowing. Do you know what’s worse? You were going to let me.”

Andy sighs, shakes her head. “But you didn’t kill me and I’m still here. So.” She makes half-hearted jazz hands. “Woo.” 

Quynh’s gaze stays hard. Then she snaps. "You were going to let me kill you," she spits, "you wouldn't even put up a fight."

"What did you want me to do?”

"I wanted you to pay. Your idea of atonement was saddling me with your murder?" As Andy struggles for words, Quynh leaves her where she stands and rounds on her heel, finds Joe and Nicky standing in the door.

“Quynh--” 

“And you both left me too, don’t think I forgot.” 

“We went from Wexford to Brest looking for you.” Nicky’s voice is somber. “I’m sorry, Quynh. We tried. It wasn’t enough.” 

“Wexford to Brest?” Quynh repeats. “You know where they dropped me?” Her jaw is tight. “Norway. So keep your apologies. I don’t want them.”  
She pushes past them and shuts the door. 

***

In the summer of 2019, somewhere in Austria, Andy holds her head in her hands. 

Her elbows have grown numb where they're resting on the table. Her mind is in 1645, in 1667, in 1812, splintering across centuries, landing in a desert where a woman is dying of thirst again and spends the next two thousand years with Andy.

The kitchen is silent. The grandfather clock by the fridge ticks over to 3. 

Booker is passed out in an armchair in the next room. Quynh is lying on the sofa, one perfectly straight line, eyes shut. Joe and Nicky are down the hall and Nile is upstairs. Andy had tried to sleep for all of 5 minutes before she came back downstairs. The cold keeps her awake down here.

Her leg bounces beneath the table. 

A chime sounds in the silence – the laptop they use for Copley. Andy lifts her head and opens the computer, tapping in the password with keystrokes weighty in a way that would make Nile laugh at her. 

They had explained the encryption to her – Booker and Copley – back in Surrey, but Andy had caught none of it. The extent of her knowledge: how to get into the inbox. What she finds once she’s in is a short message. It doesn’t take long to decipher.

_Hostages near Graz – Some buzz about kidnapped bureaucrats, almost definitely taken to the location attached below. Negotiations between the captors and negotiators have stalled. Some fears re: possible fatalities. I know you all said to ease you back in, but I thought it immoral to leave unmentioned._

Andy thinks about Copley and his idea of morality and decides she would kill to see him psychoanalysed. 

Her eyes skip over the message again and again. 

Andy checks the mission brief. Double-checks the location. More picks up her labrys, and stalks out of the door. She stands on the other side of it and gently pulls it shut.

Fuck it.

The night is silent around her. 

Andy couldn’t stay. 

It’s not an outrageous distance. She makes quick time. 

Her axe is heavy against her back. 

One field, wide and sprawling and green and too quiet, and then another. Andy cuts across the landscape. She does not think about Quynh.

The path is silent. Grass drags at her boots. 

The more she walks, the angrier she gets. It boils in her gut – that annoyance, that fury, that grief. She will not be handled with kid gloves. She is almost seven fucking thousand years old. 

There have been a hundred times she could’ve done the right thing, one time above all others where she should’ve done, and a hundred times she didn’t. Somehow, she is still here. She will be fucking damned if she doesn’t keep trying.

Further in, the place is still quiet and abandoned save for the few men on watch. Andy manages to slip past them. 

It doesn’t feel personal until one of them almost kills her. It’s only because he fumbles with his gun that Andy manages to dodge the subsequent bullet. She knocks them out cold fast. By the end of it she feels like a proper pacifist. 

Surrounded by their unconscious bodies, she cricks her neck. 

The room is silent.

And then pain rockets across the inside of her thigh, white hot. Her axe clatters to the floor. 

Whipping around, she sees a man in the doorway, gun still raised. 

The moment of shock is all he needs.

He stands there for a half-second more before taking off towards her. 

Fuck. 

Adrenaline – useless adrenaline – floods her system, shock taking over. 

He runs towards her.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This is how it’s going to end.

He must have been in the hallway. 

She was stupid – reckless – and now she’s going to die.

His arm is raising.

Andy sees it all in snapshots: the low light glinting off his body armor, the cruel narrowing of his eyes, the way her fingers are already tensed on her labrys but will make no difference. She’s shutting down.

Maybe this was the only way it was ever gonna go.

It happens too fast.

The barrel of the gun is raising to her forehead.

A breathless wheeze fills the air.

And he crumples to the ground in front of Andy.

The handle of the knife sticking out of his neck shines. His breath bubbles. Andy forces herself to stand and kicks him onto his back with her good leg, hissing against the throbbing in her other one, and drags her labrys across his throat. And he’s gone.

Andy checks her leg. The bullet only grazed off of her. 

She could have died for a bullet graze. 

It threatens to overwhelm her for the first time, how close it was. How little it was.

It still fucking hurts.

A shadow slips into the space beside her. She doesn’t have to look to know who it is.

Wordlessly, she holds her labrys out to Quynh, who takes it and takes up her back as Andy kicks the door open. 

It’s like having a limb back.

They weave around each other. Quynh slashes and sends them down, clearing space for Andy who in turn does the same for her. She can feel herself settling into her old techniques. It’s familiar. Terrifyingly so.  
She anticipates her moves, carves a path around and intertwining with them.

There aren’t many guards, all things considered. They make quick work of it. Quynh covers her and her leg. Andy holds off those who try to get in her space in close combat. 

The twisted comfort of it makes her ache. 

The sounds of the fight racket off the walls. All of the men who go down will wake up again.

Finally, Andy brings the handle of the labrys down on his head and the last guard topples onto Quynh as he passes out. 

His body lands on her, bad. She’s caught under all of his dead weight and gear. The crack of bone echoes off the walls.

Quynh lets out a low, pained groan.

Andy hauls the body off of her. He’s 120 kilos of dead weight and her arms protest. Still, he lands in a heap beside Quynh. Andy reaches a hand down and Quynh reaches up to grab onto it. Her blood-slick  
fingers are tight on Andy’s wrist.

Carefully, slowly, Andy slides Quynh’s arm over her shoulder and straightens up bit by bit. It won’t be long until she heals, now.

“They came from that way. They’ll be through there. The hostages.” Andy says, nodding her head toward the hallway they had been guarding. The movement makes Quynh suck her breath in.

There’s a crate by some empty container. 

Andy helps Quynh onto it, helps her move so that she can sit up as her rib and right shoulder knock back into place. She leans her head back against the crate, exposing her neck, long and pale and pockmarked with blood, and lets out a tight breath.

Andy takes her hand. Quynh doesn’t move away. Her fingers nigh crush Andy’s as her right ribs slot back into a normal shape. Once it’s done, she exhales. Her grip relaxes but her hand stays in Andy’s.

After a moment, Quynh’s eyes settle on her face. Her mouth is set, her eyes unreadable.

“I’m alright.” She says, finally. Her voice is quiet. Her eyes don’t move from Andy’s face, slowly moving from one part of it to the next. The feeling of Quynh’s gaze spreads over her, inching in under her skin. 

Andy drags her eyes back up to Quynh’s face. “Thank you.”

She means it. Her chest hurts with how badly she means it. Words bubble in her throat. Everything she wants to say, everything she has to say. With her oldest friend, oldest lover, oldest everything in front of her,  
she can’t force any of them out.

She tries again: “I – thank you for coming to get me.”

It’s not enough.

So Andy raises the hand she’s holding Quynh’s in and presses a kiss to Quynh’s fingertips, her eyes pressing shut. They taste like grit and sweat and blood. Against them, she whispers, “I missed you. I really  
fucking missed you.”

Nothing will ever be enough.

Andy forces herself to open her eyes and look at Quynh again. Her head is tilted almost imperceptibly, her brown eyes soft and brows pulled together, jaw set.

Soft as a breath, Quynh says: “I missed you too.”

It’s all the time they can afford. Andy steps back and Quynh jumps off the crate, and the two of them head down the hallway. 

Unfortunately, the four they’d left at the farmhouse are in that hallway; all of them tacked up and armed. When Quynh and Andy appeared, Nile shot Booker a look that said _I told you so more_ concisely than any spoken word, Joe had said: “A fucking note, Andy, all I ask,” before motioning them up the hallway. 

There are more of them further in. All of them will wake up. 

The hostages are in a former office room, up in the corner of the building. Two guards outside the door give it away. 

The air in the room feels hopeless and stained with fear. Andy hasn’t missed this at all. 

They make quick work of freeing them, doing their best to not be intimidating in the kevlar. 

They give one of the men one of Booker’s burner phones. 

The six of them slip out once they catch first sight of law enforcement howling down the country road. 

Just another job.

It is silent when they enter the kitchen. 

Exhaustion spreads over Andy. 

The scene unfolds. By the door, Nicky touches his forehead to Joe’s and then starts unclipping the back of his protective gear. A chair scrapes against the floor as Booker pulls it out and collapses into it. Nile is undoing the straps on her own gear. By the fridge, Quynh is pulling her boots off. 

Andy hobbles past them to get to the sink, opening the cabinet and reaching the bandages down. 

Cutting through the quiet, Nicky speaks. “We thought you killed each other.” He looks at Andy, shoulders slumping. “We thought you were dead.” 

“Surprise.” Andy rasps. The adrenaline is wearing off. Her head is heavy and her thigh is on fire. “We can do this later.” 

When she limps to the hallway, none of them stop her. 

Andy sucks in a breath as pain sears through her leg.

Nicky hasn’t even started stitching yet. 

The wound is deep enough to possibly be a problem, an angry maroon gash bisecting part of her thigh. Fibers from her pants had wedged into the torn flesh as the bullet cut through. They had been a bitch to get out. As she scraped them out bit by bit, Andy had felt reality fuzz out around her and had to force her eyes shut and breathe.

In the present, she’s sitting on the side of the bath and Nicky’s steady hands have stilled. The gauze lies beside them, along with a couple of wads of cotton damp with antiseptic and smudged with blood.

They’re already pushing it for time, and she doesn’t particularly fancy dealing with an infection, which is why she needs someone who’ll actually do a tidy job.

Which is why Nicky is sitting on his heels by the bathtub, needle holder in hand, pale eyes surveying Andy’s face. “The gel should’ve helped.” 

Through gritted teeth, she manages: “I’m fine. Just do it.” Anger curls beneath the reverberating pain. “I can take it.” 

“It’s stitches, not training with Nile.” 

“She told you?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out.” Nicky looks back down at the wound. 

“You know, I think I finally get all those soldiers chugging their flasks and biting sticks before you’d start fixing them up again.”

A brief, crooked smile flashes on Nicky’s face. The smile drops once more as he inspects the gash again. 

Obviously not counting Nile, of the lot of them Nicky’s the one most familiar with mortal pain; he’s updated his medical degree every couple of decades since they became a thing, and the patient, clean stitching  
of his sutures has come from digging the needle into his own flesh – something that Andy knows was more than a point of contention between Joe and Nicky for a while. 

It’s why he’s equally good at saving people as he is killing them. He understands how it feels. 

The rest of them know enough to keep someone alive. 

Andy takes another swig from the bottle resting by the bath. 

“God, okay. Fine. Just do it.” 

“You can’t move,” Nicky reiterates, “it’ll ruin the sutures.”

“Sure thing, doc.”

“Tell me about the warehouse. Nile wants us to write something up for Copley. What did you see?” 

She laughs at his attempt to distract her. “You won’t get me that easy.” 

“Okay.” 

Nicky makes the first stitch. 

It hurts. 

Andy's eyes squeeze shut. 

The needle comes up on the other side of the gash. He pulls it through, sticks the needle in again a fraction further down, and pulls it back through to the other side. He rolls up a small piece of gauze and sticks it between the thread and her skin before tying it. The extra thread cuts with a soft snap. 

This bit, Andy only hears. 

“Fucking ow,” she squeezes out when it’s done, eyes pressed shut. “Jesus.”

“You need at least seven more.” 

“Fuck.” 

“I know it’s no comfort but you could be doing much, much worse, boss.” 

“Oh, thanks.” 

“You’re lucky this is the worst wound you left with.” 

“Don’t lecture me.” 

“Forgive me. It’s just that we thought you were dead and all.” 

Shock pulls a laugh from Andy. “Wow. You want to have this conversation now?” 

Nicky shrugs innocently. “It’s this or the report for Copley.” 

They stare each other down for several long moments. 

Andy relents first. 

“Sure, whatever. There were fifteen guards, I think. They were good fighters but they weren’t –” Andy grits her teeth as the needle goes in again “– fuck my life – they weren’t professionals. Some kind of gang or something, I don’t know. When we cleared the…”

Twenty minutes later, the gash is shut. Nicky is clearing up the scraps of thread. 

“Thanks.” Andy manages. 

“Of course.” Nicky says. He chucks the thread and cotton wool and washes his hands. “I can’t believe she’s out there. Just sitting by the fire.”

A door goes in the hallway. 

Andy has since – minding her thigh – flopped herself down into the dry bath so she can lie down. The bottle lies under her arm. She cracks an eye at him. “It’s been five days.” 

“I expect her to be a hallucination.” 

“So do I. We done?” 

“Don’t climb anything. Two days at the very least, boss. I’ll be watching you.” Nicky warns. 

Andy salutes. “You got it.” 

Nicky leaves the door ajar when he leaves. 

Andy rolls her head back and stares up at the ceiling. 

Her body hurts. Deep under her skin, all along her body. She’s tired in a way she wasn’t before. And she continues to hates it. 

The fragility of her body. 

The way it is splintering in on her. 

It was an easy job – too easy, by their standards. But here she is, lying in a dry bath, too tired to move; from her stitched wound, pain radiates out; sharp and dull by turns. 

She shuts her eyes. 

After a moment, she hauls herself out. Her leg twinges when she puts the weight on it. Carefully, she makes her way down the hallway. She glances towards the doorway.

There’s a figure silhouetted by the light. 

Andy freezes in the hallway. 

Her muscles relax when she realises it’s just Quynh, staring out at the neglected vegetable patch. Andy raises her brows and joins her, shutting the door behind her. “Hi.” 

Quynh’s mind is elsewhere -- she jumps at Andy’s voice then nods in greeting, eyes following her as she comes to lean against the house. “Is your leg…?” 

“It’s fine.” Andy takes a breath. “Thanks again.”

“Thank you.” 

“You were gonna leave either way. Not me.” 

Quynh sighs. “Leave it.” 

Andy huffs a laugh, skips her brows up. “You first.” 

They grow quiet. 

She has to ask.

“What now?” 

“I was thinking of travelling.” 

“Ah.” Andy nods. 

She thinks that’s the end of it, until Quynh speaks again. 

“Do you want to come?” 

Andy looks at her, taken aback.

She looks hesitant and just as surprised as Andy feels. She opens her mouth to add something -- and doesn’t. 

It hangs in the air between them. 

It’s a bad idea. 

Andy says yes. 

***

As Andy’s getting stitched up, Quynh can feel Joe’s eyes on her. He’s tucked into the corner of the sofa. She’s perched before the fire, trying to get warm again. The night wind has seeped into her bones. The cold sends her stomach turning. 

Minutes tick by. He still glances at her. 

Over her shoulder, she says: “What?” 

“You went after her.” 

“I did.”

“How are you doing?” 

“How do you expect?” Quynh raises an eyebrow at him. 

Joe exhales thorugh his nose in lieu of laughing. 

She just looks at him.

There’s something different in the way he holds himself. 375 years has lain rest to the young restlessness in his eyes. There’s a calm there. 

For one, he’s also grown a lot better at holding his tongue. 

She says it out loud. “You’ve changed.” 

“All of us have.” Joe replies. “I’m sorry we left you.” 

Quynh just nods. 

“She fights differently,” she tells the fire, mind elsewhere. 

“She spent a while skipping about, picking up new techniques. She wanted to be ready." A beat. "I forgot how you fight.” Joe says, the shadow of a laugh in his voice. "It was good to see it again." 

Quynh looks at him. She doesn't know him anymore. In theory, she thinks but she doesn't _know_ the man sitting opposite her anymore. She doesn't know any of the people she spent three hundred years with anymore. 

She slips out onto the back deck, a little shaken, and is staring out at the overgrown weeds when Andy joins her. 

The reluctance of her bearing. The weigh she’s putting her weight on her left leg. 

Quynh isn’t sure what possesses her to ask.

But she asks. Andy replies.

***

Nile looks out at Andy and Quynh, just about visible through the farmhouse windows. They’re talking out back. 

They've sent a short memo to Copley. He wrote back almost immediately -- _nice to know he has it in him,_ Nile thinks. The story’s been hushed up because no one’s eager to broadcast the security fuck-up. He passes on thanks, both from himself and the people of who they saved.

Booker is still typing back and forth with Copley. 

“Guys?”

“Hmm?” 

“I’ve been thinking.” Nile pokes at the fire and then turns around. “I want to do something. Y’all told me that we fight for what’s right.” 

She thinks of the tired and traumatised sea of new soldiers, Dizzy having to defend her religion on base, the jabs, the bonds it forged and snapped, the way Nile gradually became unconvinced that they were defending anything; the simple fact that their army has no right to be anywhere it was, ruining the lives of those who fought for it and those subjected to its violence. 

“I want to destroy the bases.” 

It sounds simple once she’s said it. 

“Maybe the whole military. I don’t know. That sounds like a lot. I just can’t stop thinking -- they fucked me up, and I was one of them. It’s just as bad -- worse -- for those that aren’t. Some of the stuff I saw…” She sighs. “They’re not defending anything out there. I want to take them down.” 

Unless she’s mistaken, Booker is grinning from behind the laptop. Nicky has a glint in his eye. Joe looks pumped. 

So it’s Nicky who asks. 

“When do we start?” 

*** 

They leave at the end of the week. 

Nile and the men, bound for Germany again.

Quynh and Andy, vaguely heading for Helsinki. 

“Good luck,” Quynh says, slipping up to Nile. She’s liked what she’s seen of her, and she likes the plan they’ve come up with. "Under other circumstances, I'd join you." 

"Thanks." Nile zips up her bag. "You too. Tell Andy to remember the sketches." 

Quynh smiles. "I will."

A moment passes, then two, before Nile speaks again: "I'm glad you're here." 

Quynh finds that she is, too. 

She watches as they say goodbye. Quynh just nods to the group once Andy’s hugged her farewell. 

The sun is just about breaking over the trees. Quynh watches the rippling light, her legs stretched out in front of her. Throughout the carriage, other passengers tuck their noses into their coats and sleep. 

She can feel Andy watching her. Gauging her. 

It’s fair. Now that they’re actually on the train, Quynh isn’t completely sure what she was thinking. They haven’t said a word since leaving the farmhouse. Still, Quynh swings her head to face Andy. 

She doesn’t have to say “You can ask.” in much the same way that Andy does not have to ask “Why?”

So, Quynh simply says: “I don’t know.” 

She recrosses her ankles. Left over right. Andy tracks the movement then looks back up at her, for a moment holds her gaze. “Where have you been so far?”

It’s such an ordinary question that Quynh can only blink at her for a few seconds. The trees rush by outside. 

“Norway. France.” 

She keeps the sentence clipped, shears off Holland and her trip to Belgium and Denmark. To her credit, Andy does not inquire. 

They sit in silence a while longer. The train sways and hums low around them. 

Quynh doesn't want to do this on the train. But apparently she does, because the words leave her mouth nonetheless.

"I didn't think you'd leave me."

"I would have looked for you for a century more."

"But you didn't."

“I wish I did.” 

That sparks silence. 

Something lights in her gut. She doesn't know what she wants from Andromache, but it’s a little fucking more than this. So she just looks at her. The asymmetrical slant to her mouth, the slight narrowing of her  
blue eyes, the feathering of her hair where it is growing out; simply lets the image settle in her head. "Your wishes did not crack the lid of my coffin, Andromache." She intones, then asks: "What about you? Where  
have you been?" 

Here Quynh gets a huff of humorless laughter. "Everywhere.” Andy shrugs, looks out the window. “God, I have been everywhere."

Almost four hundred years. Quynh keeps her voice soft.

"Tell me."

Words, Quynh realises fast, are no longer their area of expertise. 

At first she thinks they’ll be alright. On that first train, Andy tells her about a time they spent in Sao Paolo around the time Booker joined them. 

And then they get off the train.

Silences unspool between them and roll to the floor trailing yarn. 

There’s a spiderweb of safehouses on the way to Finland. 

Not that they need to talk – the lack is just… noticeable. 

When they had first met, almost a century after their first dreams of each other, they had no language in common. But that did not stop them. They cobbled together enough to understand each other from scraps  
of other tongues and gestures and drawing.

As they began to acquire each other’s languages, they became closer. 

By the time they fell asleep and saw Lykon rising from a decimated battlefield, they barely needed words. 

Now, however, Quynh has little to say to Andy, and Andy seems scared of opening her mouth. 

So they’re reading on the train to Helsinki.

She fixes her gaze onto Andy, who is sitting up against the window seat with her legs lying straight on the other two seats; her face angled down to the brick of a book in her lap. One of her elbows is propped  
against the top of her seat, head against her fist, the other pressed against her thigh. Quynh’s eyes trace the line of the finger she has resting on the page. 

“Is it any good?”

Andy glances up at her, shrugs. “It’s alright. Depressing. Joe likes it.” Here, she interlocks her fingers and stretches her arms above her head. Her shirt rides up, exposing a pale strip of waist. She catches Quynh’s  
eye, smiles wryly: “Then again, Joe’s depressed.” 

Quynh skips her eyebrows up and looks back out of the window. 

Birches line the traintracks. Quynh imagines cracking the window open and jumping out to scale them, imagines the feeling of the sun-warmed bark under her hands. 

“How about yours?”

She lifts the book to show Andy the cover. Recognition dawns in her eyes. Quynh settles back down to read. “I’ve read it before. It’s fine. She still marries him.” 

Her eyes scan over the words, but she feels them not absorbing.

The book closes with a soft thwap. 

“Why did you say yes?”

“What?”

“Why did you agree to join me?” 

“Why did you ask?” 

Quynh should have thought as much. 

They go back to reading. 

“… And then from there go onto Gdansk.” Quynh finishes. 

"You know it'll be easier to go through Tallinn?" Andy asks around a mouthful of pirozhok, frowning at Quynh.

"I know it'll be easier to go through Tallinn, but it also would’ve been easier to just go east from Austria and here we are. I told you, I want to see Poland." 

Andy shrugs and goes back to eating. Quynh takes a bite of her own food and stares out at the landscape in front of them. The park is bustling. A small child dashes by on rollerskates, followed closely by a  
harried-looking parent. 

It’s familiar, this. Sitting together and just observing. 

It unnerves Quynh. 

She tries to ask once.

“What do you remember?” 

Quynh levels a look at Andy. 

She doesn’t ask again. 

Here is what Quynh remembers. 

Days at sea, stored in the lower deck, beating her knuckles bloody and breaking the reknitting skin against the iron; she remembers the spikes on the inside of the coffin thorning her skin, and she remembers  
hopelessness set in. 

Then, the door creaked open. 

They hauled her onto the deck. 

Through the eye holes, she saw an unforgiving sea, roiling and the colour of stone. 

The wind bellowed around them. 

Men shouted orders. 

They pulled her up.

And let her drop. 

In Saint Petersburg, she wakes up screaming. 

Andy is shaking her awake. 

“Get away from me,” Quynh scratches out, “don’t touch me.” 

Andy moves away, hesitantly settles on the edge of her bed. 

Quynh gulps in the air and runs her hands through her hair, just to make sure she can still do both. She moves her pillow out of the way and sits up at the head of her bed, the wall assured and solid behind her. 

“400 years, Andromache.” Her breath is ragged. “Every waking moment stuck down there.” 

Quynh shouldn't have told her to come. 

Andy shouldn't have accepted. 

But she stays. 

She sits on the other end of Quynh’s bed. 

Quynh stares at her for a moment. 

She rolls her eyes, and doesn’t tell her to leave. 

It happens again in Helsinki. 

This time, Quynh talks. 

“How did you find Nile?”

“Right after Copley’s trap. We dreamt of her. Book felt her die. I recognised the country.” Andy rolls her head to look at Quynh. A sleepy smile comes to her face. “I shot her, she stabbed me. How all good things  
should start.” 

“Tell me about her.”

“You’ll have time enough to get to know her yourself.” 

“I know. Tell me anyway.” Quynh can’t stand the quiet. 

(And deeper down, where she won’t let herself think it fully, she wants to hear Andy’s voice.)

“Well.” Andy shrugs, splays her hands. “She’s from Chicago, planned to go to art school and ended up in the army instead. When Book sold us out, she saved us.”

Quynh’s brow draws down. “He wouldn’t tell me. All he said was that he betrayed you.”

Andy rolls her head over to her again. “You want to know?” 

“I need to.” If she’s going to stay -- something she is still far from sure about -- she needs to know. 

For a moment, the only sound is Andy’s sigh. And then she opens her mouth and begins the story. 

The Finnish landscape smears by outside the bus window.

They’re on their way back down to pass through Sweden and begin their journey east in earnest. 

Her phone buzzes. Quynh looks up from her book. Andy fishes in her pocket. The contact name reads Nile.

“Hi, just reminding you that I am waiting on that sketch.”

“We’re not even in Sweden yet.”

“Right,” Nile pretends to remember, dragging out the vowel, “sorry, I forgot about all the updates y’all’ve been sending us.”

“Very funny. You’re supposed to be dismantling a military.”

“It’s not all cool explosions, Andy. Lot of downtime, Andy.”

“Any of you killed each other yet?”

“Not yet. Nicky and Booker got close the other day but you know how it is.” The way Nile says this – the sage tone of someone who has been with them much longer than she actually has and very much does know  
how it is – almost makes Andy laugh. With a rush, she realises she misses them. 

“Doing remarkably well, then.”

“You know it. Hey, do you remember what you said about comm lines?” 

Andy kicks the undergrowth off the hatch. It scratches against the rusting metal. 

She can feel Quynh’s eyes on her. 

The hatch opens with an almighty groan that makes Quynh wince. Andy picks her bag up again and begins the descend down. 

The rungs are rough against Andy’s palms, rusted and scraping. As soon as the first rung is free, Quynh joins her. 

It smells of dust and faintly like mold. Andy waits until Quynh has cleared the ladder and sets off down the hallway. They walk into the echoing dark, the flashlight beam an eerie headlight. 

Their footsteps ring off the walls. 

Finally, the hallway opens up onto a disused bunker. The walls jut out. The floorplan is uneven. 

“My stuff’s in here.” Andy breaks the silence. She cuts across to the door on the wall and wedges it open. It opens up onto a hollow, stretching up into a domed ceiling. Andy lights the lantern she hung here on  
her last visit. A watery yellow light sputters on. 

A couple of chests are stacked by the rounded wall. There’s tarp over the rest of it. 

Quynh is inspecting the wider part of the bunker. The clank of her boots against the stone floors is a comforting metronome. 

Andy moves forward and fishes the tarp up. She left it somewhere here. 

More boxes. A couple of frames. 

Then, a long bag resting between a couple of crates. Andy fishes it out. The weight is still familiar to her, though she hasn’t used it in over a century. She unzips it, pulls out the weapon inside the case, the cloth  
wrapped around it dry and soft under her fingers. 

The footsteps grow closer and stop at the doorway. “What is this?” 

“Used to hold ammo. Found it and spent a summer waterproofing it in the 70s.” Andy says over her shoulder. She unbundles the bow from the fabric, catching the arrows in her free hand. 

Quynh’s stepped into the room now, craning her neck up at the dark dome above them. 

“Hey,” she catches her attention, drawing her eyes and not looking away, “I kept your last bow.” Andy chucks her chin up in lieu of a heads up before throwing it to Quynh. 

She catches it, the movement instinctive, her fingers loose. 

As she lifts it, eyes growing intent as they trail up and down the bow, inspecting it beneath the light, Andy turns away. She drops to her knees before a chest and wrestles the key into the lock.

“You kept it?” Behind Andy, Quynh’s voice is soft with awe.

She doesn’t turn around, continues to rummage for the af Klint sketch. “Least I could do.” 

The sketch is pressed between the pages of a book. She flips it open and slides the worn paper out, inspects it for damage. Nile will be pleased. Joe, too – he liked her when he met her, Andy recalls.

Quiet fills the air in the bunker. Andy slips the sketch back into the book, straightens up, and turns around.

Quynh’s bouncing it in her hands, testing the bowstring. There’s silent intent in her dark eyes, scanning over the weapon and remembering the battles fought with it. It’s not that old, by their standards, but it was  
the one she was using when they were caught. 

Andy had carried it with her for almost a century, unable to pack it away even after the search stopped.

The look in Quynh’s eyes makes it worth it over and over. She lowers the bow, meets Andy’s eyes. “Thank you.”

She just nods; an idea comes to her. “Wanna see if you’ve still got it?” 

Confidence guides Quynh’s arms. The assured nocking, the summer sun shining off the muscles in her arms. Andy tracks it all. The tendons in her hand shift beneath her skin. Her back is a single, straight line as  
she pulls the bowstring back, eyes narrowing on her target – the apple Andy had rolling around in the bottom of her bag resting on top of a stone.

A breath later, the arrow flies. 

It skewers the apple with a wet crunch. 

The fruit goes skidding off the rock and lands somewhere in the grass. 

Andy lets out a wolf-whistle, grinning. 

Quynh lowers the bow, one slow and extended motion, eyes locked on the spot the apple used to be. A grin spreads over her face, crinkles the sides of her onyx eyes. Andy’s waited centuries to see it again.

When Quynh turns to her again, her smile glowing and her eyes crinkled, Andy looks away. 

The next morning they wake up in Stockholm. 

“Look at this,” Andy tosses the newspaper to her.

 _U.S Military Base In Afghanistan Still Under Lockdown As Investigation Continues_ the headline reads. Quynh smiles, arches a brow. “Looks like they’re doing a good job,” she says, folding the paper and placing it on the table again. 

Andy takes a sip of coffee. “Nile liked you.” 

“I liked her. She’s a good woman.”

“She is.”

In Kiev, Quynh uses one of Andy’s jackets as a layer. It drapes over her trousers, her white button-down. She winks at Andy when she opens her mouth to ask. 

“We should go to Italy on our way back,” Quynh muses. She grows serious and adds: “without the boys.” The boys. Andy grins. Even now, her nickname for Joe and Nicky hasn’t changed.

“Still?”

“What’d you expect?” Andy asks, Quirking a brow at her. “Ever the romantics,” she murmurs, casting her gaze out at the lights on the Bosphorus.

“Do you remember that voyage? Indonesia? 16th century, I think?”

Their slip had wrecked just off the coast. They had drowned. Once they’d swam to shore and found a place to get dry and get food, as soon as they’d cleaned up, Joe and Nicky had turned on their heel and  
headed straight back down to the surf. 

Andy scoffs. “I remember drowning.”

She also remembers washing the saltwater from Quynh’s hair, listening to her moan about their misfortune. 

“You couldn’t keep them from the water for love or money.” Quynh murmurs in the present. Her eyes are distant as she twitches the jacket draped around her shoulders a little closer around herself. 

Andy slips an arm beneath the jacket and around Quynh’s waist, pulls her into a sidelong hug. 

She rests her head on Andy’s shoulder. 

They cook dinner together in Mumbai. 

The city moves beyond their windows. The kitchen smells of frying onion. 

As she chops mushrooms, Quynh finally asks: “Was there anyone?” 

"Only Achilles."

“Tell me about him.”

“He was beautiful. Brave. Kind. You would have liked him.”

“Two hundred years and you can’t go into detail?” Quynh presses, a smile curling the side of her mouth.

Andy lets out a self-aware laugh. 

So she tells her about his hands in sheep wool, the sun on his skin as they built the first stable on their farm. The way they had circled each other with their guns drawn at the water hole. At first, she keeps to  
herself the memory of his aging hands in hers and the way they screamed at each other when he finally told her to leave him. Then she remembers who she is talking to and tells that, too, each tear-stained  
moment. 

The whole time, Quynh watches Andy with some kind of softness in her eyes. 

Three weeks in, Quynh falls asleep on Andy’s shoulder on the plane to Hanoi. 

And then they’re back.

Quynh’s arms are solid around Andy’s waist. 

The mountains rise up around them. The wind brushes against her face. Beneath them, the motorbike buzzes. 

They drive for a day. They sleep in the trees.

Andy says, “You know, we’ve got a safehouse nearby.” 

“I want to be out here.” Is all Quynh says. 

***

Something’s shifted in the ground. Quynh has read everything that happened, everything she missed, every official deported; but it feels different to be walking the ground it happened on. 

They leave the town hub and wander the forest until the mountain air chills Quynh’s lungs. 

Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance. 

One droplet lands on her face, followed by another. She turns her head up to the sky and lets her eyes fall shut. 

For a moment, Andy watches the rain trickle down Quynh’s face. She gives a shuddering breath and opens her eyes again. She looks at Andy. 

When she talks, it’s said through a smile: “We should probably find that house.” 

They find it through the trees. Blue tile, one-story. Andy hasn’t been in years. She’s surprised the water still runs. 

As soon as they enter, the sky opens and rain starts to thunder down. 

It takes an hour from when it started for the rain to ease. Quynh watches from the window, her shoulders soft lines. 

***

Water crashes through her nostrils and courses through her airways. 

Ice wraps and knots around her limbs, restraining her where she lies. 

The barest sliver of light.

Burning lungs.

Quynh opens her mouth to scream and meets only water, only water–

“Quynh.” 

She wakes up. Instinct kicks her away from the voice. 

Reality starts to trickle in. Her breath comes quick and shallow, her chest skipping up and down.

Andy is bleary-eyed, sitting on her heels by the bed, hands raised. “You were screaming.”

Quynh blinks a few times, nods distractedly. “Right.” She sucks in a breath, forces herself to breathe out to the count of 10. Andy rests her hands on the edge of the mattress.

Frogs call outside the window. The room is dark and quiet. She is on land. 

She is on land. 

“The coffin again?”

Quynh sets her jaw and nods. 

“Do you… should I go?” 

Without thinking, Quynh finds one of Andy’s hands, latches onto it; can barely look at Andy when she asks, “can you stay?”

“I can’t sleep without seeing it. Without being back there. Did you know that?” 

Quynh is speaking to the ceiling. Her eyelids are heavy. Her stomach is tight.

The bed shifts as Andy turns her head to look at her. "I thought so, yeah."

"I can barely stand the dark," she murmurs. “I just see the water. It was so very dark down there. I couldn’t always see light. Sometimes I would come to and find a fish trying to eat me.” Then what she really wants  
to say comes dredging up: “I would’ve looked for you. A century. Two. I wouldn’t have been able to rest until I had found you again. Or died trying, I suppose.” 

“I know you would have.” Andy murmurs. “I wanted to. I’m sorry.”

Quynh glances at her, nods, and turns back to the ceiling. 

For a moment, the only sound she hears is from the trees outside. 

“After they caught you I couldn’t sleep. Joe and Nicky, they tried to get me to but I couldn’t even lay my head down. I didn’t sleep through the night for a century.” Andy’s voice is a breath. There’s a hesitance to  
what she’s saying, belying more she’s not saying. “I’m sorry, Quynh. I know it’s not enough. But I’m so, so sorry.” 

Quynh turns her own head. 

In the dark, Andy’s features are hazy. The moonlight pools on her brow. 

It’s not enough. It will never be. But feels something small give way within her. 

She reaches for Andy’s hand, and doesn’t let go. 

*** 

Andy wakes up with Quynh’s hair tickling her jaw. Her arm is draped over Andy’s side, her head tucked under her chin. Her own arms are around Quynh. She’s a warm weight in her arms. 

For a moment, she thinks she’s dreaming, thinks she’s fallen into a dream where she still has Quynh, where she has not lost her to the depths of the ocean, and they are still this, the feeling of golden warmth  
before the dawn. She’s still waking up, the world and their situation hazy at the edges. 

In her arms, Quynh shifts, lets out a sigh. 

She freezes at about the same time Andy does. 

That wakes her right up. 

Quynh pulls her head out and back and meets Andy’s bleary eyes. 

“I won’t move if you don’t?” She blurts out. 

“Deal?” Quynh accepts, voice nonetheless pitching up into a question. 

In response, Andy readjusts so her head tilts down towards Quynh’s. It’s ridiculous -- they’re the same height, but they parcel around each other small. 

So they lie like that.

Andy is almost drifting off again when Quynh speaks. 

She says it with her voice low, her hands by Andy's temples where the hair is growing out and curling. A thread of gray twists over one of Quynh's fingers. 

"You were really going to let me kill you." The venom from the first time she said it is gone, leaving only the morning rasp of her voice. Quynh lets it hang in the air, waits for Andy to catch it.

“I really was.” She still remembers the blade warming against her skin. 

“Why?”

"Don't laugh," Andy drawls.

So Quynh laughs, the sound a soft, wry chime. 

It is a raft. Andy holds onto it. 

"Go on."

“I thought it was dying or dragging on knowing I’d never really have you back.”

The side of Quynh’s mouth pinches. “Dramatic.” But her brows have pushed together, delicate skin between them wrinkling, concern in her eyes.

“Yeah, obviously.” Andy says, voice low. “But I didn’t want -- I left you down there. You would’ve been right to leave me in the dust.” 

“I couldn’t.” Quynh murmurs. “I wouldn’t.” 

“Long time to spend at the bottom of the sea.” Andy reasons in reply. 

She breaths a laugh, “I’m here, am I not? Evidently not long enough.” 

She’s said it before, but she repeats it anyway. “I missed you.” 

Quynh smiles at her. Her lips are soft when they press to Andy’s.

***

A few days later, just south of Da Nang, Andy’s phone buzzes. 

[Book -- 14:07] We’re heading east

[Book -- 14:07] Okinawa’s supposed to be nice this time of year ;) 

[Book -- 14:09] Nile says that was cheesy and I should be sorry. You two in? 

Andy shows the texts to Quynh. 

She’s sitting on the roadside barrier, stretching her legs out before they set off again. Her hair is bundled into a braid catching the sunlight. 

Taking a sip from her water bottle, Andy looks at her, really looks; the length of her legs stretched out before her, the reality of her body before her. 

The cold mountain air. The water rushing somewhere through the trees. The water vapour drifting up from the leaves and the flowers left on the rock face. 

“So?” Andy nudges Quynh’s boot with her own. “Are we?” 

Quynh arches an eyebrow at Andy. “You really have to ask?” 

That makes her grin. 

In one swing, Quynh pushes herself off the barrier so she’s standing. As she waits for Quynh to clip her helmet back on, Andy swings a leg over the motorbike and kicks the stand back up. 

It’ll be this as long as it can be: Quynh’s arms joining around Andy’s waist, the smell of rain on asphalt mixed with the scent of earth after the rain has passed, continuing up the road and knowing it leads home  
for the first time in centuries. 

As long as their bodies allow, it will be teasing apart military bases until they know exactly how to take apart the monolith that chewed their newest up, taking what missions Copley sends their way: getting as  
close as they can get to doing good without the wax on their wings melting. 

For now, it is the weight of Quynh’s body against Andy’s back, her chin grazing the collarbone that took weeks to close up, the twinge of Andy’s wrist as she revs the bike, the needling reminder her body is here,  
here, here, and the breeze picking up as they set off. 

It is driving down the road knowing it will lead you home. 

***

In the expanse that will become the Gobi in the year that’ll become 673 B.C, a woman falls to the sand. 

Her skin is flaking from her bones. 

A shadow falls by her side. 

When she comes to again, a figure is squatting by her side, waterskin in hand. The water is cool and sweet down her throat, the figure’s fingers gentle on her jaw as they tilt it up. 

Slowly, she pushes herself up off the ground. 

As she does so, the person unwraps the scarf from their face. 

“Andromache,” she says, hand on her chest. 

Quynh already knows. How could she not? Night after night, years stacking on years seeing her. How could she not know? 

She smiles weakly, and pulls her dream, the woman made reality among the sand and the stone, into an embrace. 

After a moment, her dream embraces her back. 

Quynh curls her head into the crook of the woman’s neck.

It feels like coming home. 

Andromache does not let go.

And neither does Quynh.

**Author's Note:**

> it's a bit of ao3 formatting, michael. how long can it take? 3 hours? 
> 
> whew. it's really over. i fell asleep trying to post it but we did it joe. thank you to [aimmyarrowshigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh) for being lovely to do this with and for making the graphics (!!!) which will be posted shortly! :) and to [Hell_Again](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hell_Again/pseuds/Hell_Again) for being a good friend and such a funny and patient beta <3 and ofc to the Mods of the big bang.. long live the Mods. this fic gets a bit silly but at this point i am fully in the sillay sauce. 
> 
> some tidbits or maybe examples: 1) this fic came from me listening to like a river runs by bleachers in the thick of my tog hyperfixation and having a lot of feelings about it as a quynh tune 2) andy is reading a little life on the train.
> 
> i haven't written an author's note in 5 years ok bye thank you for reading i'm on tumblr [@zemlinika](https://zemlinika.tumblr.com)


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